Sapporo TV Tower

This guide to the Sapporo TV Tower follows Tachu Naito, a Japanese structural engineer who in nineteen sixteen watched his suitcase slide across a train carriage and began sketching how a building might sway with a shock instead of resisting it. It traces the test of that theory on the Industrial Bank of Japan's Tokyo headquarters, built to his design just before the Great Kanto earthquake of nineteen twenty-three, and the string of red lattice towers that followed. Look up at the crisscrossing red steel above Odori Park and think of the ordinary train ride that started it.