Sustainable Regeneration

Compiled by Team IAnD

Photography: Edmund Sumner; courtesy Conran and Partners

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A competition win, Tokyo's single largest development in the last 10 years and Japan’s first to be accredited with LEED ND Gold Standard (Pre-Certified Plan) is designed and supervised by collaborative design studio Conran & Partners...

A 20-hectare urban regeneration project in Bunkyō-ku, Japan was pitted for by the likes of architects Cesar Pelli, KPF and Kengo Kuma in an international competition in 2004 and the winning design by Conran and Partners has now come to fruition.

Section showing the green link connecting the Tama River to the ecosystem of the Todoroki Valley

Diagram highlighting the green link connecting Futako-tamagawa-eki station to Futakotamagawa Park

The scheme, located on the south-west edge of the city alongside the Tama River, comprises a total of 400,000 sq. m. of retail, office, leisure and residential building, as well as a new city park. The first phase of the project, launched in March 2011, was made up of 260,000 sq. m.  of mixed-use development and the recently completed final phase creates an additional 140,000 sq. m. of development including retail, a cinema complex, TV studio and leisure uses, surrounding a 30-storey office building surmounted by a three-storey hotel.

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Conran and Partners' design concept for the project responds to the essential elements of the site: its location on the very edge of Tokyo, its adjacency to the Tamagawa River and the shift across its one kilometre length, from the urbanity of the railway station to the west, to the park to the east. As such, the scheme reflects the site's important transitory role at the threshold between city and nature in this popular, family-orientated neighbourhood.

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A unifying landscaped plateau has been created across the whole site through which a ribbon element defines the journey: a promenade celebrating this transitional route. The individual building designs responding to their specific locations along the route, with a bolder use of colour adjacent to the railway station, becoming lighter and more delicate in detail towards the park.

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The scheme's references to nature are expressed as stone strata, both as eroding planes within the base plateau and in the stepping form of the low rise buildings. The project is the first in Japan to achieve LEED ND Gold Standard (Pre-Certified Plan) – equivalent to the UK BREEAM 'Excellent'.