Hiroshi Hara, 1936–2025

In a similar path to most architects, before he could realize a nearly half-kilometer-long train station in Kyoto and a pair of 40-story towers in Osaka linked by a sky bridge, Hiroshi Hara designed houses. Most famous among them is his own house, completed in 1974 on the western edge of Tokyo. It is a simple rectilinear volume following the slope of the hillside when seen on the outside, but the house is like a valley inside, with rooms topped by acrylic domes cascading down to a central corridor bathed in the light from a linear skylight. In its arrangement of rooms along a “street,” the exceptional Hara House is also village-like, illustrating how Hara was influenced by experiences of vernacular architecture as well as nature; in fact, the 1970s saw Hara conduct surveys of vernacular settlements in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia.

Writing in 1990, Hara described the Yamato International Building, completed in Tokyo in 1987, as being “designed based on the concept of ‘village in architecture.’” He further described the office building as “a solid which consists of twelve layers, each partly chopped off,” and the facade as “a combination of two different colored aluminum panels. Depending on the light, the horizontal stripes of the exterior face continue to appear and disappear.” The Yamato building's stepped profile, complex massing, and outdoor terraces for the employees of the fashion design company resemble the buildings of a hillside town, even leading critic Hiroshi Watanable to call it “a high-tech Shangri-la.”

Hara's solution for Yamato's long linear site near Haneda Airport presages the similarly proportioned but considerably larger and more complex Kyoto Station completed a decade later. Basically a city within the city, the 470-meter-long building features a hotel, department store, cultural center, and, at its heart, a jaw-dropping 64-meter-tall atrium with stairs and escalators connecting the building's eight floors. Curiously, railroad functions occupy just 15 percent of the megastructure-like building — a building so tall, Kyoto's 31-meter height limit had to be more than doubled to make it allowable.

If both towers of the Umeda Sky Building, completed four years ahead of Kyoto Station, were placed end to end, the tower would still be shorter than the station: 346 meters vs. 470 meters. Although the Umeda Sky Building reaches just 173 meters — making it the 23rd tallest building in Osaka, as of today — the building makes a statement on the Osaka skyline thanks to the mirror glass covering most of the towers, the “Garden in the Sky,” as Hara called it, linking the towers at the top, and the escalators providing access to this elevated perch for gaining panoramic views of Osaka.

Hiroshi Hara was born in Kawasaki, Japan, on September 9, 1936. He received three architecture degrees from the University of Tokyo: a bachelor's degree in 1959, a master's in 1961, and a PhD in 1964. He was an associate professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Tokyo and then a professor in the university's Institute of Industrial Science. Professionally, he collaborated with Atelier Φ from 1970 until 1999, when the practice changed to Hiroshi Hara + Atelier Φ. In addition to being an architect and educator, Hara wrote a considerable amount of architectural theory in the form of essays and books, including What Is Possible for Architecture? (1974), Space from Function to Modality (1987), and Discrete City (2004).