The new town of Makuhari is sited on a dredged fill at the rim of Tokyo Bay. Our concept interrelates two distinct types: silent heavyweight buildings and active lightweight structures. The silent buildings shape urban space and passage with apartments entered via inner garden courts. The concrete bearing walls have thick facades and a rhythmic sequence of openings. Slightly inflected according to sunlight they gently bend space and passage. Celebration of natural phenomena is taken up by the lightweight “activist” forms. Individuated “sounds” invade the heavyweight “silence” of the bracketing buildings. Inspired by Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the semi-public inner gardens and the perspectival arrangement of activist houses form an inner journey.















Steven Holl (design architect)
Tomoaki Tanaka (project architect)
Mario Gooden, Tom Jenkinson, Janet Cross, Terry Surjan (project team, master plan)
Anderson Lee, Sumito Takashina, Sebastian Schulze, Gundo Sohn, Justin Korhammer, Bradford Kelley, Lisina Fingerhuth, Anna Müller, Jan Kinsbergen, Hideaki Ariizumi (project team, design development/construction)
Toshio Enomoto, Masahiro Shimazaki, Kazuhiko Funo, Akihito Morino, Yashushi Ninomiya (project team)
Konichi Sone (principal)
Tomoko Watanabe (project architect)
Yoshihiro Kanamaru, Hisakazu Ishijima (project team)