Why you should experience WITH HARAJUKU in Tokyo, Japan.
WITH HARAJUKU is a topographically driven commercial complex where Jingumae's fashion culture, Takeshita Street's street-level intensity, Meiji Jingu's forest and Toyo Ito's urban architecture converge directly opposite Harajuku Station.
Set along Omotesando near Takeshita Street and just steps from Harajuku Station, the complex occupies a steep site whose roughly eight-meter east-west elevation change is absorbed into a semi-open passage connecting the station side with the streets behind it. Stepped terraces rise beside the passage through planting conceived around the former Genjiyama hill, with substantial timber frames facing the forest of Meiji Jingu and smaller volumes descending toward Takeshita Street. Walking through the building turns a difficult change in grade into a continuous pedestrian route, opening successive terraces, shops and elevated views across a part of Harajuku previously divided by dead-end lanes and large residential buildings. The result is a complex where topography, circulation, timber construction and planted terraces make movement through Harajuku itself the principal architectural event.
What you should know about WITH HARAJUKU.
WITH HARAJUKU is best known for Takenaka Corporation and Toyo Ito & Associates transforming a 5,067.99-square-meter station-front site into an architectural passage connecting Harajuku Station with Takeshita Street. NTT Urban Development commissioned the redevelopment across land previously occupied by properties including the 1959 Harajuku Apartments and Harajuku Daiichi Mansions, consolidating multiple parcels into a 26,638.55-square-meter complex. Toyo Ito developed the project around the concept of “road architecture,” treating the passage as public circulation capable of joining Omotesando, Takeshita Street and the forest edge of Meiji Jingu through the building itself. Takenaka Corporation translated that proposition into ten floors above ground and three below, combining steel, reinforced concrete and steel-reinforced concrete across retail, exhibition, residential and cultural uses. The architecture subsequently received the 2020 MIPIM Asia Award silver prize for Best Retail Development, recognition in the Wood Utilization Excellent Facility Competition and the 64th BCS Award in 2023. NTT Urban Development, Toyo Ito and Takenaka Corporation consequently turned an irregular station-front parcel into a piece of connective urban infrastructure whose architectural recognition derives directly from its treatment of Harajuku's terrain and pedestrian movement.
The project's planted terraces extend the circulation concept through an ecological reconstruction of Genjiyama, the hill historically associated with this elevated part of Jingumae. Takenaka Corporation developed planting strategies using bird species as environmental indicators and selected native vegetation to connect the terraces with the broader green network extending through Meiji Jingu, Omotesando and Ura-Harajuku. Wind conditions through the passage were evaluated alongside vertical planting using indigenous woody species, allowing the building's stepped landscape to operate across walls, terraces and low-rise roofs. Sirius Lighting Office developed the lighting component within a wider technical team that joined Takenaka's landscape work to the architecture by Toyo Ito & Associates. Genjiyama, native planting, avian indicators and the vertical forest extend WITH HARAJUKU's connective principle from pedestrian circulation into landscape engineering, giving the project a second system of continuity across the surrounding district.
How to fold WITH HARAJUKU into your trip.
WITH HARAJUKU works as the architectural anchor within a daytime Jingumae progression connecting ukiyo-e collecting, twentieth-century military commemoration and the centennial architecture of Meiji Jingu.
Begin at Ota Memorial Museum of Art, whose collection developed from approximately 12,000 ukiyo-e works assembled by fifth-generation Seizo Ota before his family established a public museum after his death in 1977. The holdings subsequently expanded to approximately 15,000 works spanning both woodblock prints and hand-painted ukiyo-e, with Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Oi represented within a collection designed to trace the medium across its historical development. Continue to Togo Shrine, dedicated to Admiral Togo Heihachiro, commander of Japan's Combined Fleet during the Russo-Japanese War and the Battle of Tsushima. The shrine was established in 1940 after Togo's 1934 death, destroyed during the wartime bombing of Tokyo and rebuilt in 1964, giving the precinct successive architectural chapters tied to the commemoration of a figure worshipped there as the deity of victory and sincerity. Conclude at Meiji Jingu Museum, designed by Kengo Kuma and completed in 2019 for the shrine's centennial period, with approximately 3,200 square meters devoted to objects associated with Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. Kuma divided the roof into low, tapered forms, incorporated Yamato-bari exterior detailing and reused zelkova and camphor removed during construction for furniture and interiors, tying the museum physically to the cultivated forest planted through nationwide contributions after Emperor Meiji's death. The progression moves from Seizo Ota's private formation of a major ukiyo-e collection through Togo Shrine's wartime destruction and reconstruction into Kengo Kuma's architecture within Meiji Jingu's century-old forest, placing WITH HARAJUKU inside a Jingumae shaped by collecting, commemoration and successive approaches to cultural architecture.
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