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| Tokyo Midtown |
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Tokyo Midtown is a 569,000 square meter (6.1 million sq ft) mixed-use development in Minato, central Tokyo, Japan. Completed in March 2007, the Ą370 billion ($US3 billion) project includes office, residential, commercial, hotel, and leisure space, as well as the tallest building in Tokyo and the new quarters of the Suntory Museum of Art.
The project site takes up 78,000 square meters (19.4 acres) previously occupied by the Japan Defense Agency in Roppongi area of Minato, along Gaien Higashi and close to Roppongi Crossing, and less than a kilometer from the similarly scaled Roppongi Hills complex.
The 330,000 square meters (3.5 million square feet) of office space includes as its main tenants Fujifilm, Fuji Xerox, Yahoo! Japan, Cisco Japan and Konami, as well as a medical clinic affiliated with the U.S.-based Johns Hopkins Hospital. The luxury 250-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel occupies the 47th through 53rd floors of Midtown Tower, their first hotel in Tokyo, under a long-term lease arrangement.[1]
The 5-floor retail Galleria, with 73,000 square meters (786,000 sq ft) of stores, restaurants and shops includes the first Terenc Conran restaurants in Japan, a wine bar (Coppola's Vinoteca) showcasing the wines of Francis Ford Coppola, and an outlet of high-end American food retailer Dean & DeLuca.
The primary developer is Mitsui Fudosan, working in concert with several partners. The project was designed by architectural firms Nikken Sekkei and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with landscape architecture of the surrounding new 40,000 m˛ (10 acre) public park designed by EDAW, the Suntory Museum of Art designed by Kengo Kuma, and the design of the retail Galleria handled by the Colorado-based CommArts.
Tokyo Midtown is also the home of Design Sight 21_21, a design gallery/workshop created by fashion designer Issey Miyake and architect Tadao Ando. "The idea was to create not only a museum that shows exhibits," says Ando, "but also a place for researching the potentiality of design as an element that enriches our daily life, a place that fosters the public's interest in design by arousing in them different sights and perspectives on how we can view the world and the objects surrounding us."[2] The building, designed by Ando, is on the edge of the park area, and features 1,700 square meters (18,300 sq ft) of floor space, including two galleries and an attached cafe run by chef and restaurateur Takamasa Uetake. The split-level concrete structure includes a hand-sanded steel roof (whose design was inspired by Issey Miyake's A-POC ("A Piece of Cloth") concept) and 14-meter long glass panels.
Buildings
- Midtown Tower is the tallest building in Tokyo Prefecture at 248 meters (814 ft), but not the tallest in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. It is the fourth-tallest in Japan, after Yokohama's' Landmark Tower, Osaka's World Trade Center Building and Izumisano''s Rinku Gate Tower Building. The building includes office space, condominiums, and, at the top floors, the Ritz-Carlton hotel.
- Midtown East
- Parkside
- Midtown Front
- Midtown Gardenside (formerly known as Midtown West) will feature the Oakwood Premier Tokyo Midtown luxury serviced apartments.
- Galleria
References
- ^ Statistics courtesy of Mitsui Fudosan [1]
- ^ From "Sight of the Times" by Gordon Kanki Knight, Wallpap*, Issue #98 (April 2007)
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