TWIN21

A pair of identical 38-storey, 150-metre towers completed in March 1986 in Osaka Business Park, adjacent to Osaka Castle. Developed by Matsushita Kogyo (Matsushita group) and designed by Nikken Sekkei, they remain the defining landmark of OBP.

Use

Office tower

Area

Chuo, Osaka

Completed

1986

Floors

38 above ground, 1 below

Height

150 m

Developer

Matsushita Kogyo

Architect

Nikken Sekkei

Two Towers Beside a Castle

At Shiromi 2-1-61, Chuo-ku, Osaka — directly connected to Osaka Business Park Station on the Nagahori Tsurumi-ryokuchi subway line, and adjacent to Osaka Castle Park — stand TWIN21 (Twin Twenty-One). Completed in March 1986, each of the two towers rises 38 storeys above ground and one below (plus a mechanical penthouse level) to a height of 150 metres. The developer was Matsushita Kogyo, the real-estate arm of the Matsushita (now Panasonic) group, and Nikken Sekkei handled the design. The two towers are formally known as Panasonic Tower (formerly National Tower) and MID Tower.

The visual logic of TWIN21 is deliberate: two structurally and formally identical towers facing each other across a shared plaza, with the green castle park rising behind them. In a city with Osaka’s layered history, the pairing of Edo-period stone fortifications and late-twentieth-century corporate glass creates one of the metropolitan area’s most distinctive panoramas.

Osaka Business Park and the Corporate New Town

TWIN21 sits within Osaka Business Park (OBP), a planned business district developed on former industrial land east of the city centre, between Osaka Castle and the Yodo River. In the 1980s, as the bubble economy began to inflate, large private developers and corporations identified OBP as a site for a new kind of urban workspace: high-density, greenery-integrated, and presented as an alternative to the crowded central business districts of Umeda and Namba.

TWIN21 was among the first buildings to be completed in OBP and helped establish the district’s visual identity. The Matsushita group’s decision to anchor OBP with a pair of towers — identical in form, deliberately symmetrical — was a statement about corporate presence and urban ambition. What followed at OBP and in the adjacent Osaka Amenity Park (OAP) confirmed that TWIN21 had opened a chapter in Osaka’s east-side urban story.

Summary

TWIN21 was completed in March 1986, with each of its two towers rising 38 storeys to 150 metres in Osaka Business Park. Developed by Matsushita Kogyo and designed by Nikken Sekkei, the pair of identical towers beside Osaka Castle remain OBP’s most recognisable image — and one of the most unusual urban juxtapositions in the Kansai region.

Take the subway to Osaka Business Park Station and step out into the plaza between the towers: 1986’s corporate vision of the future, framed by a seventeenth-century castle keep, is visible from where you stand.

Related: Grand Front Osaka | Abeno Harukas

Visiting Osaka’s Business Park or the castle area? Find accommodation on Rakuten Travel.