NowOsaka

Architecture

Architecture in Osaka

Osaka was a merchant city before it was anything else, and its architecture tends to be blunt about what a building is for. The two things it exports are Tadao Ando's concrete and the engineering of very large temporary events.

• Grand Ring

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  Completed 2025

  Sou Fujimoto

  The circulation route and shelter of Expo 2025, a timber ring two kilometres around on the island of Yumeshima. Fujimoto built it in cedar, cypress and glulam pine, joined with nuki joints where a beam is slotted through a post, the temple method reinforced here with steel for seismic loads. The walkway on top rises and falls between twelve and twenty-two metres. Meant to come apart and be reused, it is the biggest structure on the site and the most provisional.

• National Museum of Art, Osaka

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  Completed 2004

  César Pelli

  A museum on Nakanoshima, the island between the two rivers, built entirely below ground. Pelli put three storeys of galleries under the water table in a thick concrete shell, and marked the entrance with a curving steel and glass structure drawn from bamboo. It is the only thing on the site that reads as a building. Everything that looks like architecture here is a sign for the museum rather than the museum itself.

• Umeda Sky Building

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  Completed 1993

  Hiroshi Hara

  Two office towers north of Osaka Station, joined at the top by a bridging observatory. The connecting structure was assembled on the ground and lifted into place whole, which is why the towers meet in one ring rather than a series of links. The void framed between them is the subject of the building. Hara designed it as a fragment of a city in the air, and the escalators crossing the open gap are the closest it comes to admitting that.

• Row House in Sumiyoshi

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  Completed 1976

  Tadao Ando

  A house replacing the middle unit of three in a timber row. Ando built a blank concrete box and gave a third of it to an open courtyard, so the rooms face inward and the street sees nothing. Crossing from the living room to the bedroom means walking outside, in whatever weather the day has. His first significant building already contains the trade he has offered every client since: comfort surrendered for a relationship with the sky.

• Osaka Castle

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  Founded 1583

  Toyotomi Hideyoshi

  The castle Hideyoshi founded on the site of a destroyed temple complex, at the centre of the city he meant to rule from. What stands today is a 1931 keep of reinforced concrete, paid for by public subscription and copied from surviving screens and drawings. The stone base and moats below it are the seventeenth-century work, at a scale the tower never matches. It is two buildings stacked: a real fortification carrying a modern monument shaped like the one that burned.