GREEN SPRINGS, Tokyo

Why you should experience GREEN SPRINGS in Tokyo, Japan.

GREEN SPRINGS is a verdant urban quarter where Midoricho's former airfield territory, large-scale public landscape, contemporary architecture and cultural ambitions converge beside one of western Tokyo's largest expanses of parkland.

Set along Sansan Road near Takamatsu-dori and just steps from Tama Shinkin Bank Head Office, the complex forms the northern culmination of the pedestrian axis extending from Tachikawa Station toward former airfield ground. A roughly one-hectare central plaza rises above parking concentrated on the first level, allowing trees, lawns, water and pedestrian paths to occupy much of the development's elevated public plane. Broad eaves finished with Tama-region cedar frame semi-exterior terraces around the plaza, and glass façades maintain visual connections between interior rooms and the planted ground beyond. The result is an unusually porous commercial district whose architecture gives open landscape the spatial authority normally reserved for buildings in a major station redevelopment.

What you should know about GREEN SPRINGS.

GREEN SPRINGS is best known for transforming a 38,900-square-meter parcel controlled by Tachihi Holdings into a new district built around unusually low site coverage for its commercial zoning. Tachihi traces its corporate ancestry to Ishikawajima Aircraft Manufacturing, established in 1924 and later renamed Tachikawa Aircraft, linking the developer with the aviation industry that profoundly altered twentieth-century Tachikawa. Planning for the project placed offices, retail, hospitality and cultural functions across separate structures reaching 11 floors above ground and one below. The development contains approximately 76,000 square meters of total floor area despite a zoning allowance of 500 percent floor-area ratio; the completed scheme uses roughly 159 percent. Construction began on February 17, 2018, with Yamashita Sekkei and Obayashi Corporation responsible for major portions of design and Obayashi leading construction outside the separately developed S1 building. Completion came in February 2020, and phased public activity began that April during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequent recognition included the 2021 Good Design Award, the Gold Prize for large commercial or complex environments at the 2021 Japan Space Design Award and the 63rd BCS Award in 2022.

Landscape engineering provides a second factual thread through a development whose planted ground performs ecological work alongside its civic role. The central biotope reproduces a Tama River backwater habitat using local soil and aquatic plants, supporting medaka, loaches, silver crucian carp, dark chub and freshwater shrimp. A Cascade recreates the character of flowing water associated with the Tamagawa Josui and climbs toward a Sky Deck overlooking the neighboring parkland. The main pedestrian routes cross in an X configuration conceived around the intersection of Tachikawa's past and future and the meeting of the station district with the greenery to its north. Public art became another planned component through the Tachihi Public Art Award 2020, which attracted 125 groups from 12 countries and selected five competition winners to join three invited artists. Tetsuya Nakamura's Rising Dragon was installed in October 2019, and Emmanuelle Moureaux's mirai uses 100 numbered elements to visualize the century from 2020 through 2119. The planted architecture later received the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Award in the 21st Rooftop and Wall Greening Technology Competition and a Special Excellence Award at the fourth Green Infrastructure Awards.

How to fold GREEN SPRINGS into your trip.

GREEN SPRINGS works as the anchor for a daytime progression through an internationally scaled public-art project, a municipal collection preserving Tachikawa's archaeological and social history and a national park created from the former U.S. military airfield.

Begin at Faret Tachikawa Art, where 109 works by 92 artists from 36 countries occupy streets, plazas and functional street furniture across the station's northern redevelopment district. Artists represented include Niki de Saint Phalle, Vito Acconci, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Stephen Antonakos and Rebecca Belmore, with sculptures incorporated into benches, bollards, ventilation structures and other pieces of the urban fabric. A management committee formed by building owners, the volunteer Faret Club and Tachikawa City oversees conservation and public programming across the collection. Continue to Tachikawa Historical and Folklore Museum, which opened on December 1, 1985 after Shigeo Inoue donated part of an estate his family had occupied for more than 400 years. Excavation during construction uncovered the Dainoshita archaeological site, including remains of a Heian-period settlement. The two-story reinforced-concrete building was designed around the visual character of a traditional kura, and the property retains an Inoue family storehouse, well and a pond fed by water emerging from the terrace escarpment. Conclude at Showa Kinen Park, created across former U.S. Tachikawa Air Base ground as part of the national project commemorating the fiftieth year of Emperor Showa's reign. The first 70 hectares opened on October 26, 1983, beginning the conversion of military aviation territory into a national park that now extends across approximately 180 hectares in Tachikawa and Akishima. Its planning divides the ground into five zones, moving from a more formal urban axis toward recreated Musashino landscapes farther north. The progression moves from late-twentieth-century public art through the archaeological depth beneath Tachikawa's residential ground into the conversion of an immense military airfield, exposing successive layers of the city that make GREEN SPRINGS' contemporary redevelopment part of a much longer physical reinvention.

MAKE IT REAL