Toranomon Hills Mori Tower, Tokyo

Why you should experience Toranomon Hills Mori Tower in Tokyo, Japan.

Toranomon Hills Mori Tower is a soaring urban complex where Toranomon's business culture, postwar infrastructure ambitions, public-private redevelopment and vertical urbanism converge above one of Central Tokyo's most consequential road projects.

Set along Shintora-dori near Sakurada-dori and just steps from Toranomon Hills Station, the 247-meter tower rises 52 stories above a section of Loop Road No. 2 carried directly through its five-level basement structure, joining transportation infrastructure and architecture on the same site. Nihon Sekkei organized 244,360 square meters around expansive offices, residences, conference facilities, Andaz Tokyo and 6,000 square meters of open space, giving the building a scale extending far beyond a conventional office tower. Moving between Oval Plaza, the commercial levels and the elevated public spaces reveals how the tower distributes greenery and pedestrian circulation around infrastructure once conceived principally for vehicles. The result is a building where Nihon Sekkei, Mori Building and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government turned a 68-year road project into the architectural catalyst for Toranomon's twenty-first-century redevelopment.

What you should know about Toranomon Hills Mori Tower.

Toranomon Hills Mori Tower is best known for integrating a 247-meter skyscraper directly with Loop Road No. 2 through Japan's Multi-Level Road System, resolving an infrastructure project whose city-planning origins reached back to 1946. Loop Road No. 2 was initially planned as an 9.2-kilometer, 100-meter-wide route before its width changed to 40 meters in 1950, yet the Shimbashi-Toranomon section remained unrealized for decades amid the difficulty of acquiring urban land. Legislation establishing the Multi-Level Road System in 1989 created a mechanism for roads and buildings to occupy vertically separated portions of the same property, and the redevelopment plan adopted in 1998 shifted the road beneath the future tower. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government subsequently selected Mori Building as designated builder in 2009, with Nihon Sekkei designing a steel structure containing 244,360 square meters across 52 aboveground and five underground floors. Obayashi Corporation constructed the complex as Loop Road No. 2 passed through the basement, and the Shimbashi-Toranomon road section entered service in March 2014 after 68 years of planning. The tower received a 2017 BCS Award and a 2018 Urban Design Award from the City Planning Institute of Japan, giving formal architectural recognition to a project whose central achievement joined metropolitan infrastructure with private development.

Jaume Plensa developed a separate cultural strand within Toranomon Hills Mori Tower through Roots, the ten-meter-high seated figure commissioned by Mori Building for Oval Plaza in 2014. Painted stainless-steel characters drawn from eight languages construct the figure's body, connecting Plensa's longstanding exploration of language and human form with a plaza conceived as one of the tower's principal public spaces. Chinese sculptor Zhan Wang extended the art program into the second-floor office entrance with a commissioned work associated with the energy generated by the new district, and Korean artist Sun K. Kwak carried linear movement into the elevator-hall spaces nearby. Japanese painter Satoshi Uchiumi completed the sequence at the carriage entrance through an 27-meter composition divided across five large oil-painted sections and organized around changing greens associated with Japan's seasons. Plensa, Zhan Wang, Sun K. Kwak and Uchiumi turn circulation spaces across Toranomon Hills Mori Tower into a coordinated public-art program that extends the building's authorship beyond engineering and architecture.

How to fold Toranomon Hills Mori Tower into your trip.

Toranomon Hills Mori Tower works as the contemporary anchor within a daytime Toranomon and Atago route connecting Edo fire protection, the birth of Japanese broadcasting and one of the country's earliest private art institutions.

Begin at Atago Shrine, founded on Tokugawa Ieyasu's order in 1603 atop the 26-meter Atago Hill to protect the newly established shogunal capital from fire. Homusubi no Mikoto became the shrine's principal deity, and the steep 86-step approach acquired its enduring association with advancement through the Edo-period account of Marugame retainer Magaki Heikuro riding a horse up the staircase before Tokugawa Iemitsu and returning with plum branches, transforming the ascent into one of Atago's defining religious traditions. Continue to NHK Museum of Broadcasting on the same hill, where 30,000 pieces of broadcasting equipment trace a communications industry that began regular Japanese radio broadcasting in 1925. NHK developed from that radio era through television and subsequent digital systems, and the museum concentrates microphones, cameras, receiving equipment and program history around Atago, the district associated with Japan's earliest broadcasting infrastructure. Conclude at Okura Museum of Art, founded by industrialist Kihachiro Okura in 1917 as Japan's first incorporated private art museum and now the country's oldest surviving private museum. Chuta Ito designed the present Chinese-inspired building after the original complex was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, housing a collection of 2,500 works assembled by Kihachiro and his son Kishichiro that includes three National Treasures, 13 Important Cultural Properties and 44 Important Art Objects. The progression moves from Tokugawa Ieyasu's use of Atago Hill as a spiritual defense for Edo through the district's role in Japan's broadcasting revolution into Kihachiro Okura's institutional preservation of Asian art, placing Toranomon Hills Mori Tower within a neighborhood repeatedly reshaped by ambitious civic, technological and cultural projects.

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