Shiodome City Center

A high-rise office in Shiodome Sio-Site, with the former Shimbashi Station preserved at its base.

Use

Office tower

Area

Minato City

Completed

2003

Floors

43 above ground

Height

216 m

Shiodome City Center and the transformation of Higashi-Shimbashi, Minato City

Higashi-Shimbashi, Minato City, Tokyo. This area, where a former Japanese National Railways freight yard once spread out, is known as a district where large-scale redevelopment advanced from the 2000s onward. Completed in 2003 on one corner of it, Shiodome City Center is an office building of 43 floors above ground and a height of 216 m — one tower that forms the skyline of the Shiodome area.

Reachable on a short walk from Shimbashi Station, this building conveys an overwhelming verticality when seen from the street. The area, where several office buildings exceeding 200 m are clustered, is one of the districts with the highest density of high-rise architecture in the city center. Shiodome City Center, as a building that carried that formative era, could be called a presence that shapes the framework of the area.

The context of the former freight yard site

The place name Shiodome derives from the former Shiodome Freight Station that once existed here. This area, long left as a large unused tract in the city center, became a full-fledged target of redevelopment in the 1990s. The year 2003, when Shiodome City Center was completed, falls in the period when that redevelopment began to take shape in reality.

Because it was a former freight yard site, a vast, consolidated plot could be secured, which is said to have made large-scale office development at the block scale possible. Such conditions are said to have, in part, supported the realization of supertall buildings exceeding 200 m. The present streetscape around Higashi-Shimbashi was greatly repainted by the redevelopment carried out in this period.

Summary

Shiodome City Center is an office building completed in 2003 in Higashi-Shimbashi, Minato City, with 43 floors above ground and a height of 216 m. Positioned within the larger context of the redevelopment of the former freight yard site, this building continues even now to carry the silhouette of the town as a tower symbolizing the area’s rise into high-rise form.

When you walk the Shimbashi and Shiodome area, its height and presence catch the eye even from afar. Before discussing any particular function or tenant, if you become aware of “what kind of land history this 216 m tower stands upon,” you are made to feel anew the magnitude of the city’s change. To see a high-rise not merely as a single piece of architecture but as one nodal point in the town’s transformation — that, I feel, is one of the joys of touring this kind of building.