Marunouchi Park Building

A 34-story, approximately 170-meter office tower completed in 2009 by Mitsubishi Estate. Its defining feature is the restored Mitsubishi Ichigokan — a three-story red-brick building originally from 1894, now a museum — placed on the same site as the modern skyscraper, creating an unusual pairing on Marunouchi Nakadori.

Use

Office tower

Area

Chiyoda City

Completed

2009

Floors

34 above ground, 4 below

Height

169 m

Total floor area

approx. 204,729 m²

Developer

Mitsubishi Estate

Architect

Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei

A Victorian Building at the Foot of a Modern Tower

Walk south from Tokyo Station along Marunouchi Nakadori and you will eventually come across a three-story red-brick building whose scale seems entirely at odds with the skyscrapers around it. Behind it, a 34-story tower rises quietly into the sky. This is Marunouchi Park Building, completed in April 2009 by Mitsubishi Estate, designed by Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei. The tower stands approximately 170 meters tall, with four basement levels, and encompasses a total floor area of approximately 204,000 square meters. The contrast between the Victorian-style brick building at ground level and the glass-and-steel tower above it is the defining visual of this stretch of Nakadori.

The small brick building is Mitsubishi Ichigokan — a restoration of the original building completed in 1894 and designed by British architect Josiah Conder. The original was demolished in 1968. For the Park Building project, Mitsubishi Estate undertook a painstaking reconstruction using approximately 2.3 million bricks, setting the restored structure on a new seismically isolated foundation. Today it operates as Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, a venue for exhibitions focused on Western art and design from the nineteenth century.

Restoration as Redevelopment Strategy

The decision to reconstruct Mitsubishi Ichigokan alongside a major office tower reflects Mitsubishi Estate’s long-term approach to the Marunouchi district. The company has been reshaping the area in phases — what it calls stages. Marunouchi Park Building was designated the first project of the “Second Stage,” shifting focus from the landmark rebuildings of Marunouchi Building and Shin-Marunouchi Building (the First Stage) to the more incremental replacement of individual office blocks along Nakadori.

The logic contains a productive tension: to build new, the old must sometimes be demolished, yet here demolition became the occasion to bring back something older still. The 1894 building was gone by 1968, but the 2009 project recreated it — not as a pastiche, but as a historically documented reconstruction with active museum functions that animate the street every day.

Summary

Marunouchi Park Building, completed in 2009 as a 34-story tower rising approximately 170 meters, is notable not only for what stands above ground but for what stands beside it: the restored Mitsubishi Ichigokan, a Victorian-era brick building brought back from demolition by the same developer who built the skyscraper. The pairing on a single Chiyoda City block is an unusual statement about how a city can grow while choosing, selectively, to remember. Walk along Nakadori and let the two buildings come into view at once.

Related articles: Marunouchi Building / Shin-Marunouchi Building

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