13 Buildings You Should Visit When You’re in Tokyo

The Imperial Hotel, built in Tokyo in the early 1920s, is one of the few works located in Japan by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright went beyond his usual style to produce a rich, playful, yet disciplined space that had many references to the architecture of Japan. Wright’s design was a redevelopment of the preexisting Victorian, ultra-luxurious Imperial Hotel, founded in 1890, only a stone’s throw away from the emperor’s palace. The new hotel was a constellation of small but perfectly formed spaces. Different levels hosted little rooms, and unexpected terraces formed an ornate composition around two parallel wings of guest rooms. Cubic forms dominate most of the building’s sections. Although these cubic forms utilize the space in a standardized way, almost every room appears different from the rest—one of Wright’s greatest design achievements as far as this building is concerned.

The Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, struck Japan on the very day of the hotel’s grand opening ceremony, strangely defining the hotel’s fate. After miraculously surviving that earthquake, the building suffered intermittent irreparable damage in later years from floods, other earthquakes, bombs, and pollution, until its owners were finally forced to dismantle it in 1968. However, the building was partially reconstructed in 1970 at the Meiji Mura architecture museum in Nagoya, where it is constantly visited by students of Frank Lloyd Wright’s style. You’ll need to leave Tokyo to see it, but it’s worth the trip. (Ellie Stathaki)

The two gymnasia by Tange Kenzō have a number of claims to attention—their ingenious cable-hung roofs are hurricane-resistant; the larger building seats 15,000 spectators and was, when built, the largest space spanned by such a roof. Above all, however, they are beautiful. The stadia were built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—the first to be held in Asia—and Tange’s buildings were perhaps a bid to outdo Pier Luigi Nervi’s superbly engineered structures at the Stadio Olimpico for the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Tange’s roofs curve down from majestic concrete pylons to perimeter walls that swirl like the tail of a comma. There is no distraction from this dramatic interplay of structure—no pretty details or extra rooms tacked on. The structural ties within the roof of the smaller stadium, seen from within as they spiral sharply up to a high window, are among the most memorable images of the Modernist movement. In the two buildings, Tange achieves a remarkable fusion: the engineering seems so compellingly logical that it appears universal and inevitable, but at the same time there seems to be something distinctively Japanese about the profiles—an echo of traditional roofs, perhaps. This was the perfect architectural statement for the time: advanced engineering entirely at home in an Asian context. It is hard to argue with Tange’s 1987 Pritzker Prize citation, which described the gymnasia as being ”among the most beautiful structures built in the twentieth century.” (Barnabas Calder)

This building forms the end of a housing and office block in Ginza, Tokyo, appearing from the highway as a terminal spike. It occupies a narrow triangular site of only 2,034 square feet (189 sq m), located directly at the Tokyo Expressway Number 1 exit. Tange Kenzō designed it as a slender tower, clad in black aluminum. The stairways and elevators are accommodated in a central, cylindrical core, rising 620 feet (189 m) above the ground. The shaft extends deep into the ground in order to counteract the lateral forces on the tower. Twelve stories with 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq m) of office floor cantilever out from the tower, stretching almost randomly to different sides like the branches of a tree. The floor plan is as triangular as the site. Like Kurokawa Kishō’s Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) nearby, this is one of the seminal small towers of modern Japan.

The Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Center marked a turning point in Tange’s work. Partially emancipating his architecture from the doctrines of Le Corbusier’s concrete edifices and the Metabolists’ megastructures, Tange started to produce more rangy buildings that reacted strongly to their surroundings. The tower is also exceptional in Tange’s portfolio: while most of his buildings convince by the skillful structuring of their sheer mass, this one exhibits a subtle, natural, and accomplished setting of small elements.

Only two years after its completion, Tange was commissioned to build a new headquarters for the same firm a few miles to the south. The building had become too small, and modular extensions of it were not feasible. The new complex, again treelike in character, consists of three buildings with office space stretching as large floors from a rectangular core, leaving here and there an open floor. (Florian Heilmeyer)

Nakagin Capsule Tower begins unremarkably. Square, truncated concrete pillars support a conventional first floor, which spans a ground level undercroft. The only unusual object is a model capsule display unit.

From the first floor upward, however, the tower view changes to a remarkable cluster of modular, offsite-manufactured capsules inserted in an 11-story steel skeleton crowned with two fins. Completed in 1972, this was the very first capsule accommodation design—and it looks like a giant multipin motherboard connector unit. Each tiny apartment is modular on the outside but contains a ”mod” interior. The original built-in furniture is extant: a white plastic console wall begins with storage units; drop fronts create double-duty tables; and spotlights and air conditioning vents are designed to swivel and direct as needed. The console ends with a telephone, a reel-to-reel tape deck, radio, speakers, flip-clock, and television conveniently inserted over the bed. A 3-foot-diameter (0.9 m) porthole is the sole natural light source. A molded all-in-one plastic toilet/shower/sink unit opens with a caplet-shaped door. That is all of the 7.5-by-12-by-6.8-foot (2.3 x 3.8 x 2.1 m) unit.

Each capsule had a 25-year lifespan but, many years past their use-by-date, the originals remained in place. The owners began to revolt when living conditions became less salubrious. Claims of defects, corrosion, and asbestos were made, and residents formed the Nakagin Capsule Tower Demolition and Reconstruction Committee.

Kurokawa Kishō realized he had to accept criticisms of his original design and rethink the units so as to protect the overall concept. The cause became “replacement and reconstruction.” (Denna Jones)

From the busy Tokyo street, the Spiral’s facade hints that something worth a second look may be going on beyond. There is the logic of a grid, but none of its uniformity. The planes are slightly askew, with a cone appearing in a false window. Architecture’s rules are outlined, and then broken, something entirely appropriate for a center for the arts.

Behind the eclectic facade, the Spiral, completed in 1985, presents spaces for performance, movies, music, and the visual arts. A café, bar, and restaurant define it as a social space, too, and large glass areas give a sense of openness not always achieved in arts buildings. But the real magic of the Spiral happens in its connecting staircases—and most particularly the spiral ramp that seems to glide in a floating fashion from one level to the next in the rear gallery space. The stairways running alongside windows provide quiet landings, little platforms on which to sit and gaze out at the city, proving that creativity and culture have as much to do with peaceful spaces as they do with spectacle and sensation. The spiral itself borrows, perhaps, from the archetypal ramp-in-a-gallery, the curving walkway in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York. Here it is a more subtle intervention, a gentle upward arabesque courtesy of its creator, Fumihiko Maki, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1993. (Gemma Tipton)

The perennially radical Nigel Coates first came to the media’s attention while he was teaching in 1983. Legend has it that when two visiting professors refused to countenance the fashion-driven approach of his students, Coates simply waited until they had left and then passed all the students regardless. Obviously feeling empowered, he went on to establish NATO—Narrative Architecture Today to its friends, or Nigel And The Others to its critics—a group of like-minded students, architects, and teachers.

Very much in touch with the contemporary city, Coates developed a style that appeared to be the architectural equivalent of music’s New Romantic movement. Predictably it did not find a market in the staid architectural environment of the United Kingdom, but, by the mid-1980s, he started to pick up restaurant, retail, and club commissions in Japan. Tokyo’s The Wall is a fine example of his work of that period. Located in a city where high land prices mean that commercial buildings have to start repaying their rent almost instantly, Coates’s innate desire to explore pop culture found a natural home.

This bar and restaurant complex, completed in 1990, was meant to look like an ancient Roman wall that was still under construction and partially hidden behind a cast-iron gas works screen. While it was being built the building was wrapped in a huge hoarding that opined: “The concept for the building revolves around a wall of monumental proportions—a wall which could have been built by the Romans, a wall of stone and giant arches, a wall which could have encircled cities. But unlike the ruins of Rome, this wall is both ancient and still being built.” In retrospect The Wall anticipated the theming fad that went on to become a staple of both British and U.S. shopping districts. (Grant Gibson)

Akira Suzuki, a well-known architecture critic, publisher, and curator, asked the firm Bolles+Wilson to design this house for his family at the start of the 1990s, a decade of bankruptcies and recession in Japan. Suzuki House was built before the “bubble” burst in Tokyo, where property was hugely expensive, building regulations tricky, and houses rebuilt every 20 years or so.

The brief called for an unlikely tour de force: accommodate a family of three, with a car, within a house acting both as a shelter and an urban event to be built on a corner lot of 23 feet (7 m) by 18 feet (5.5 m). The German-based architects responded with a simple hymn to non-gravity: a narrow concrete box in equilibrium on two steel legs, clearing just enough space for the tiniest car, with just enough room within for a series of vertical stairs to a roof terrace, almost a perch, above this quiet area on the outskirts of one of the world’s busiest metropolises.

Halfway between Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more” and Morris Lapidus’s “Too much is never enough,” this house is infused with invention and pragmatic responsibility in relation to the fulfilling of its functions. It tells us about pleasure and lightness—that of designing it, that of living in it—and about cleverness and optimism in a contemporary world in which these seem so often incongruous. (Yves Nacher)

The island of Odaiba, just in front of Tokyo harbor, was built in the 1980s as a new amusement park for the metropolis. Built on reclaimed land, this artificial landscape provides the setting for the iconic Fuji TV Headquarters Building. Architect Tange Kenzō, who played a key role in designing the postwar reconstruction of Japanese cities, created a Neo-Metabolist megastructure that denies any relation to human scale in its amusement park surroundings with its gigantic Ferris wheel and fun rides.

The building consists essentially of two huge blocks connected by a web of enclosed corridors, over which is suspended a massive, shiny, titanium-faced sphere that appears like a UFO that has crashed into the structure. The sphere, which is 105 feet (32 m) in diameter and weighs 1,300 tons, houses an observation platform popular with tourists. The grid structure of the huge volume is further emphasized by recessed banks of windows and textured columns. The escalator, encased in a tube of glass and steel, is reminiscent of the Pompidou Center in Paris, but, generally speaking, the architecture of this innovative building is unparalleled. Yet, it seems somehow to be perfectly scaled for Tokyo, and, thanks to its titanium cover, it shimmers in the light like an oversized machine from the future, despite it having been completed in 1997. (Florian Heilmeyer)

Tokyo International Forum consists of two theaters, more than 64,583 square feet (6,000 sq m) of exhibition space, several conference rooms, a library, numerous restaurants, and shops.

The project began with an open international competition held in 1989, which was won by New York architect Rafael Viñoly. As the new project was to occupy the previous site of Tokyo’s city hall, which has two of the city’s busiest commuter hubs on either side of it, the designers had to work with an irregularly shaped site. Viñoly proposed a dramatic design consisting of a 196-foot-high (60 m), hull-shaped glass and steel atrium accompanied by a group of four blocklike performing arts areas that increase in size sequentially, to house the theaters, restaurants, and shops. These various buildings are linked by a granite-lined public plaza that allows for Tokyo’s constant stream of pedestrian traffic. The plaza also contains the Yurakucho Canopy, a vast freestanding glass structure.

The atrium forms the main entrance to the complex, which was completed in 1997, and from inside the view is akin to looking through an X-ray of a whale. The atrium is crisscrossed on the inside and around the perimeter by a number of glass-encased walkways that also act as structural braces against high winds. It consists of 215,280 square feet (20,000 sq m) of laminated, heat-strengthened glass that allows natural sunlight to penetrate to the lower levels. Tokyo International Forum is a truly unique civic complex that has the power to astound. (Jamie Middleton)

Omotesando, Tokyo’s most elegant avenue, is famous for being studded with the architectural jewels of the global luxury brands, but the tiny back streets threading off it are where the hidden treasures are to be found. Here you will find coruscating parades of Japanese street fashion and, if you’re observant, the enigmatic Undercover Lab. Klein Dytham Architecture created it in 2001 for a local hero of these streets—famed fashion designer Jun Takahashi. The building is both quiet and powerfully striking. A massive tube clad in black metal, looking like a levitating shipping container, hovers beside the road, invisibly tied at its rear to a heavy cubic volume faced in recycled bricks imported from London. In contrast to the structural drama, the sobriety of the forms and materials seem at first difficult to square with Klein Dytham Architecture’s usual palette of witty shapes and vivid color. Is this sober treatment maybe due to Mark Dytham’s whispered speculation that they are “Modernists at heart”? “No,” Astrid Klein corrects, “we try not to have a style, because it would get boring to do the same thing every time.” Each project is a new journey, with finding the destination part of the adventure. In this case the client is a dark magus of post-punk baroque with a love for London and rough-edged brick surfaces, who eschews the flashy strut of the main drag. Undercover Lab is both brand identity and modus operandi. (Carol King)

When Tokyo residents think of the Yoyogi Uehara neighborhood, the first image that likely comes to their mind is that of the park created on the site of a former U.S. barracks prior to the 1964 Olympics. The park is surrounded by a popular mix of 1920s and 1930s Japanese homes, dating from the early days of this garden suburb, augmented by modern masterpieces of residential architecture. The I House by Jun Aoki, completed in 2001, certainly adds to the neighborhood’s trendy veneer. Its impact comes not from its size—the basement floor measures 400 square feet (37 sq m)—but from its uncommon, eye-catching design.

Between compliance with the Tokyo earthquake regulations, which enforce a minimum gap between properties, and recognition that adjacent building heights demanded a desperate quest for light and views, Aoki found a way to force his Abstract Modernism (some say Postmodernism) onto the challenging site. He added the personal touch that he had polished ever since leaving Arata Isozaki's office in 1991 to establish his own practice. A concrete shell made up of distorted intersecting planes encloses a domestic space balanced between two opposing masses linked by flow lines: the line of the upper floor and mezzanine floating above the stabilizing line of the basement dug into the ground. With the passage of natural light being skillfully orchestrated deep into the interior, Aoki confirmed his taste for peculiar collisions in space design and ornamentation. (Yves Nacher)

International designer-clothing company Prada has an impressive history of commissioning unusual, not to say radical buildings. After the success of the company’s flagship store in New York designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Prada commissioned another leading practice, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, to design its Tokyo outlet.

Built in the fashionable Aoyama district of Tokyo, the store is a six-story, five-sided glass “crystal” on a corner site made up of a series of diamond-shaped panes, and in a form that is reminiscent of a child’s drawing of a pointed, roofed house. These panes—transparent shells at a human, display-window scale—are by turns flat, concave, and convex, with the effect that the building appears to breathe and move as one walks around it. Unusually for Tokyo, there is a plaza in front of the entrance, complete with trees and plants.

Inside the building, which was completed in 2003, the effect is of a continuous space, achieved by the creation of structural cores and tubes that are extruded from the diamond shapes and morph into elevators, stairs, and fitting rooms. Hairy surfaces are mixed with viscous finishes, in materials such as pony skin and silicon, along with display tables of molded, transparent fiberglass. Below ground, the same oak has been used as at Tate Modern, England, with lacquered steel for the stairs and an ivory-colored carpet. This is a beautifully realized and stylish building, its honeycomb-like mesh acting as a perfect beacon for the expensive wares on offer inside. (David Taylor)

This abstract and dramatic L-shaped concrete-and-glass structure is a welcome addition to Omotesando, Tokyo’s famously fashionable, tree-lined boulevard, an avenue which acts as an aspirational showcase for both Japan’s flagship fashion stores and its cutting-edge architecture. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect Toyo Ito for Italian luxury leather goods outlet Tod’s, the building needed to provide offices for the staff and be a customer boutique. As space on Omotesando is at a premium, the site was squeezed between two other buildings, which only gave Ito a 109-foot (33 m) front facade to catch the customer’s eye; his design successfully used the entire building to attract attention.

Ito built on his previous work at the Serpentine Gallery in London where he married the structural support with an outlandish concrete geometric surface pattern. Here, the structure’s visible concrete exoskeleton, interlaced with hundreds of fragments of opaque and transparent glass, is based on silhouettes of the Zelkova trees that line the street outside.

Ito’s striking concrete tree motif starts off as thick trunks at the base of the building which then split to form tapering branches at the higher levels. The pattern, visible from inside and outside the building, provides different daylight effects on the different floors. No supporting columns inside means the company can display their luxury goods to maximum effect. In a central district composed of signature shops by designer architects, Tod’s (completed in 2005) still provides a profoundly beautiful visual statement which distinguishes Ito’s design from the crowd. (Jamie Middleton)