The “Marunouchi Manhattan Plan,” and the rebuilding of the Marunouchi Building into a mixed-use city (1988)

What it means that a company whose grand plan failed began with a building of its own

The picture drawn in 1988 and the building that stood in 2002 are not the same thing. A vision of roughly sixty towers of forty to fifty storeys across 113 hectares broke against the objection — what gives you the right to redo other people’s buildings? — and what actually moved was the rebuilding of one property the company itself owned. When President Fukuzawa Takeshi gave his reasons for the rebuild, they were not about the district’s future either, but the findings of the post-earthquake seismic assessment and the fact that adding shear walls would make the floors unusable. A company refused by its neighbouring landowners can be seen to have started changing the district from the one building nobody could argue about.

The caution of the method and the boldness of the content were, though, separate matters. Devoting forty thousand square metres from the first basement to the sixth floor to retail overturned the trade’s settled belief that shops do not succeed in Marunouchi, and the floor-area ratio was built up to 1,437% by using the special district system and transferring unused rights from a neighbouring building. A district levelled to nine concrete storeys by the 1959 plan was, forty years later, rebuilt by exhausting every device for adding floors. That it began by admitting frankly how functionally obsolete the building had become is perhaps what made the turn possible.