Day 4 – Marunouchi District
“Marunouchi (丸の内) is a commercial district of Tokyo located in Chiyoda between Tokyo Station and the Imperial Palace. The name, meaning “inside the circle”, derives from its location within the palace’s outer moat. It is a center of Japan’s financial industry, as the country’s three largest banks are headquartered there.”1
We first started by touring the Marunouchi district with a director from Mitsubishi’s development group, Mr. Oshima and a Japanese architect that Mr. Miyama works with frequently, Mr. Matsuo. Companies in Japan are like the great Daimyo clans of old, they own various different sub companies and tend to have very strong teritorial strongholds in different portions of the city. Marunouchi is the home of the great Mitsubishi company and they own nearly all the land in the district which lies between Tokyo Station (the main train station) and the Imperial Palace directly in the heart of Tokyo.
The two jewel buildings are the Marunouchi Building and it’s successor, the Shin-Marunouchi building. The pair flank the main road linking the Imperial Place and Tokyo Station. The architects for both was the Mitsubishi owned firm MJS [Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei] an A&E firm of over 570 architects & engineers. Many of the buildings in the are, including both Marunouchi buildings, have been designed with stout bases that narrow at the point where the tower rises. Mr. Oshima explained to us that there had once been a law that no building could be built over 31 meters, a height below that of the emperors palace, such that no one could look down on the emperor. All turn of the century buildings conformed to this (ans the buildings fronting the street along the edge of the imperial palace grounds still do) but when the law was revoked, the architects chose to retain the morphology of that pre-exising form because integrating the new tower above. The intention was to preserve the same street feel that the district had always had.
On our tour, we saw the Marunouchi One building (view website about the history of this building here) and it’s museum inside. This was the original Mitsubishi building and was later demolished. The Mitsubishi Corporation painstakingly rebuilt the building exactly to it’s original form. The craftsmanship and brickwork is amazing. The museum isn’t open to the general public yet, and won’t be for several more months, but we were lucky enough to get a sneak peak which included the history of the district and details on the reconstruction.
We then went to MJS offices for a presentation on the modern development of the Marunouchi District. An incredible model, set in a room adjacent to their presentation room, details the entire district in miniature. It was an architect’s dream. Suspended from the track above (and controlled with a PS3-like controller) and model camera can be moved through the model displaying real-time video on the wall. So cool.
Afterward, Brian and I each gave a presentation to their architects about the different kinds of work we do. We talked about the projects, the differences between American and Japanese construction, design and requirements. It was a really good exchange of information.
