World Business Garden

A twin-tower office complex completed in 1991 in Makuhari New Urban Centre, Chiba. Rising 35 storeys and 157 metres, the Marivue East and West towers were developed by Kashima Construction, Mitsui Fudosan, and Dai-ichi Life Insurance, and designed by Nihon Sekkei.

Use

Office tower

Area

Mihama, Chiba City

Completed

1991

Floors

35 above ground, 1 below

Height

157 m

Developer

Kashima Construction / Mitsui Fudosan / Dai-ichi Life Insurance

Architect

Nihon Sekkei

Twin Towers at the Edge of the Bay

At Nakase 2-chome, Mihama-ku, Chiba — within walking distance of Kaihin-Makuhari Station on the JR Keiyo Line — stands World Business Garden (WBG). The complex was completed in 1991 and comprises two identical towers, Marivue East and Marivue West, each rising 35 storeys above ground (plus one basement level and two mechanical levels) to a height of 157 metres. Development was carried out by a joint venture of Kashima Construction, Mitsui Fudosan, and Dai-ichi Life Insurance; Nihon Sekkei was the architect.

The name “Marivue” evokes the waterfront setting of Makuhari New Urban Centre, a planned business district developed on reclaimed land along the Tokyo Bay coast in Chiba. WBG was positioned as a centrepiece of that district’s commercial core, designed to accommodate corporate headquarters and large-scale office operations at a distance from central Tokyo.

A Planned City Built on Policy

Makuhari New Urban Centre was a product of the “business nucleus city” policy that shaped Japanese urban planning in the 1980s and 1990s. National policy called for decentralising office functions from central Tokyo by creating high-density business districts at key rail nodes in the metropolitan periphery. Makuhari, with its proximity to Narita Airport and the new exhibition facility of Makuhari Messe, was chosen as one such nucleus.

WBG arrived at the height of Japan’s bubble economy, when the logic of building large office towers far from the established urban core still attracted optimistic projections. The twin towers’ clean rectangular profile and their symmetrical arrangement — two identical volumes facing each other across a shared space — gave the new district its most recognisable visual marker. The grid of Makuhari’s planned streets, the scale of the exhibition centre, and WBG’s towers together formed the image of a Japanese office city of the near future, as it was imagined in 1991.

Summary

World Business Garden was completed in 1991, rising 35 storeys to 157 metres in Makuhari New Urban Centre, Chiba. Developed by Kashima Construction, Mitsui Fudosan, and Dai-ichi Life Insurance, and designed by Nihon Sekkei, its twin Marivue towers anchor the commercial core of a planned business district that embodied late-bubble Japan’s ambitions for suburban office decentralisation.

Take the Keiyo Line to Kaihin-Makuhari, step off the train, and walk toward the bay: WBG’s symmetrical towers frame a view that captures the urban vision of a specific decade — still intact, still worth seeing on foot.

Visiting Chiba or the Makuhari area? Find accommodation on Rakuten Travel.