Shinagawa Season Terrace

A 32-storey office tower completed in 2015 on an artificial ground platform built over the active Shibaura Water Reclamation Center, with approximately 3.5 hectares of rooftop gardens above an infrastructure district in Konan, Minato City.

Use

Office tower

Area

Minato City

Completed

2015

Floors

32 above ground, 1 below

Height

144.32 m

Total floor area

approx. 206,025 m²

Developer

NTT Urban Development / Taisei Corporation / Hulic / Tokyo Toshi Kaihatsu / NTT Facilities / Nihon Suiko Sekkei

Architect

NTT Facilities

Built on Top of a Working Sewage Facility

Konan 1-chome, Minato City, Tokyo. Walking east from Shinagawa Station’s Konan exit, a white glass-curtain-wall tower comes into view against a backdrop of canals and treetops. Shinagawa Season Terrace was completed in 2015: 32 floors above ground, one below, with a height of approximately 144 metres and a total floor area of roughly 206,000 square metres.

What sets this building apart is what lies beneath it. The Shibaura Water Reclamation Center — a sewage treatment facility that has operated since 1931 — continues to function directly below the site. Using Japan’s three-dimensional urban planning law, the project team built an artificial ground platform over the active facility and placed the office tower on top of it. Six companies carried out the development, with NTT Urban Development as the lead, and NTT Facilities handling the design. A stormwater retention basin was also integrated into the platform below, extending the layered use of infrastructure across the entire site.

Heat from Below, Gardens Above

The relationship with the underground infrastructure extends beyond structure. Thermal energy recovered from the wastewater treatment process is fed into the tower’s air-conditioning system, making the treatment plant double as an energy source for the building above. On the artificial platform, two green spaces — the North Garden and the South Garden — spread across a combined area of roughly 3.5 hectares. Finding that scale of open greenery in a central Tokyo office district is unusual; its existence here depends entirely on the infrastructure layering below.

The Konan 1-chome address places Shinagawa Season Terrace in the same arc of post-JNR waterfront redevelopment as Shinagawa Intercity and Shinagawa Grand Commons. But its approach — building over a live utility rather than a cleared site — gives it a distinct character within that neighbourhood’s story of reinvention.

Summary

Shinagawa Season Terrace was completed in 2015, standing 32 floors and approximately 144 metres above Konan, Minato City. Its defining idea — an office tower and 3.5-hectare rooftop gardens set on an artificial platform over an active water reclamation centre — makes it one of the more distinctive examples of layered urban infrastructure in Tokyo.

Walk east from Shinagawa Station’s Konan exit, step onto the artificial ground, and look up: the city reveals another layer of itself.

Related: Shinagawa Intercity / Shinagawa Grand Commons

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