Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building | North Observation Deck
Free forty-fifth-floor observation deck in a twin-towered skyscraper shaped like a circuit board and a cathedral.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building traces architect Kenzo Tange's return, in his seventies, to design a bigger successor to the city hall he had built decades earlier. It follows the design argument behind the twin towers, meant to read at once as a circuit board nodding to Japan's electronics boom and as a Gothic cathedral echoing Notre Dame, plus the roughly billion dollars in public money spent building it at the peak of the bubble economy. It also covers the building's brief run, starting in 1991, as the tallest tower in Tokyo.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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