Gate Tower Building

A 16-story office building completed in 1992 in Fukushima Ward, Osaka, notable worldwide for having the Hanshin Expressway Ikeda Line pass through floors five to seven. The elevators skip those three levels entirely.

Use

Office tower

Area

Fukushima Ward, Osaka

Completed

1992

Floors

16 above ground

Height

72 m

Developer

Suezawa Sangyo

Architect

Azusa Sekkei

The Office Tower an Expressway Passes Through

Few buildings in the world share their floors with a highway. The Gate Tower Building in Osaka’s Fukushima Ward is one of them. Completed in 1992 and rising 16 stories to approximately 72 meters, the tower stands in Ebie 6-chome — and the Ikeda Line of the Hanshin Expressway enters the building at the fifth floor, threads through the sixth and seventh, and exits the other side, as if the skyscraper were a tunnel. The building was designed by Azusa Sekkei Co., Ltd. and built by Sato Kogyo Co., Ltd. for owner Suezawa Sangyo.

The expressway structure is entirely independent of the office building’s frame. The roadway is supported by its own columns, isolated from the tower’s skeleton by a ring of vibration-damping bearings, so that traffic noise and exhaust do not travel directly into the occupied floors. Because floors five through seven belong to the highway, the elevators skip those three levels — pressing “4” and “8” are adjacent button choices in a car that moves, in effect, through a vehicle lane.

An Unusual Sequence of Urban Problem-Solving

The Gate Tower Building owes its peculiar form to a planning sequence that ran in reverse. The expressway corridor had been designated before the building’s development, and the two projects ultimately proceeded in parallel, with the tower’s structural envelope designed from the outset to accommodate the road passing through it. The result is a building that holds a curious record: it is both an ordinary speculative office block and, at its middle three floors, part of a metropolitan highway network.

In a city that also produced Grand Front Osaka and the Nakanoshima towers across the same generation of development, the Gate Tower Building stands apart — not for its height, but for the engineering problem it chose to solve in the middle of its floor plan. The expressway ramp that passes through it is visible from the sidewalk below, a short walk from Hanshin Noda Station.

Summary

Completed in 1992, the Gate Tower Building is a 16-story, approximately 72-meter office building in Fukushima Ward, Osaka. Designed by Azusa Sekkei and built by Sato Kogyo, it remains one of the only buildings in the world through which an active expressway passes — the Hanshin Ikeda Line occupying floors five through seven. The elevators skip those three floors, and the road and the building share not a single structural column. A short detour from central Osaka, it rewards the visit.