Gate Tower Building A sixteen-story office building in Fu | Honest historian
Gate Tower Building
A sixteen-story office building in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, notable because a highway runs right through it.In 1983 a decision was made to partially demolish and renovate the buildings in the area, partly because they were dilapidated and needed modernization, and there were also plans to build the Hanshin Expressway in the same area. However, the building codes in effect at the time made it impossible to build a building and a road on the same site. Negotiations for about 5 years between the land owners, the Hanshin Expressway Corporation and the city government led to the current project.
For this reason, local highway construction laws, city planning laws, and city redevelopment law and city planning codes were revised in 1989 to provide what is known as the Rittai Do-ro Seido Multilevel Road System, which allows buildings and road network to be integrated into a single space. The system was originally designed to facilitate the construction of a second ring road in the vicinity of Tokyo's Toranomono Business District, but was never used there. Instead, the system was launched during the construction of the Gate Tower Building, which became the first building in Japan with a highway running through it. Roads in such cases are usually built underground, and passing through buildings is extremely rare.
