Toranomon Hills Mori Tower

A supertall office building standing above Loop Route 2 — the starting point of the regeneration of the Toranomon area.

Use

Office tower

Area

Minato City

Completed

2014

Floors

52 above ground

Height

247 m

Developer

Mori Building

The tower that changed a town called Toranomon

In Toranomon, Minato City, Tokyo, there is a high-rise tower with a particularly commanding presence: Toranomon Hills Mori Tower, developed by Mori Building. Since its completion in 2014, with its imposing scale of 52 floors above ground and a height of 247 m, it has fundamentally repainted the silhouette of this town.

Many people, hearing the place name Toranomon, will picture its former image — adjacent to the government office district, somewhat plain and subdued; that impression long took root in the area. Yet with the appearance of this tower, the mood of the town gradually began to change. One after another, redevelopment projects started moving in the vicinity, and Toranomon is now talked about as one of the most closely watched business areas in Tokyo. A single piece of architecture can rewrite the context of a town — this is a place that brings that home anew.

As the starting point of redevelopment

Mori Building is a developer known for large-scale urban redevelopment, as represented by Roppongi Hills. Toranomon Hills Mori Tower, too, is said to have been positioned not merely as the construction of a new office building but as a project that acts on urban structure itself.

Especially noteworthy is that this tower was advanced together with the development of Loop Route 2, the road sometimes called the “MacArthur Road.” With the construction of this trunk road, which had long remained at the planning stage, linked to the building’s construction, a dynamic redevelopment rarely seen in Tokyo — in which transport infrastructure and urban development move at the same time — was realized. Such composite town-building through public-private cooperation is said to have become a foundation that supported the subsequent growth of the Toranomon area.

The tower’s use is centered on offices, and it has functioned as a base where companies from Japan and abroad gather. It is said that an environment was kept in mind in which emerging companies, including startups, could move in easily, and you could say this was one factor that created the flow by which this district came to be recognized as a “new hub of business.”

Summary

When you actually walk Toranomon, the presence of Mori Tower is far more powerful than it looks in photos. Looking up, the façade of glass and steel stretches toward the sky, and on a clear day it rises as if cutting out the blue. The figure of 247 m is, heard as a number, merely a fact; but standing on the spot, the body properly receives that vastness.

More than ten years on from completion, several more buildings have joined the Toranomon Hills area, and the shape of the town continues to be updated even now. As the single point of its beginning, Mori Tower will likely keep symbolizing the identity of the Toranomon area.

The real appeal of high-rise architecture lies not only in height or form. It lies in how, in what context, in what era, and for whom a building was built — in how it is etched into the town along with its whole story. In that sense too, Toranomon Hills Mori Tower is, in my personal view, a building that will remain in the urban history of Tokyo.