Umeda Sky Building

The Umeda Sky Building is a pair of skyscrapers in Osaka, Japan, joined at the top. Each tower has 40 stories, and glass bridges with escalators and elevators cross the open space between them near the roof. It stands at the edge of the Umeda business district in Kita Ward and is one of Osaka's best-known landmarks. Visitors can ride the glass escalators across the gap.

Architect Hiroshi Hara designed it and the Takenaka Corporation built it; it opened in 1993. The towers are about 170 metres tall, or 190 metres counting the spires. The rooftop viewing deck, the Floating Garden Observatory, gives wide views across Osaka.

The idea behind it

The building began in 1988 as the "City of Air" project, which imagined four linked towers. When Japan's bubble economy collapsed, the plan shrank to two. Hara had two ideas: a modern landmark inspired by the Grande Arche in Paris, and a "floating city" in the sky, contrasted with the solid ceramic atrium on the ground. The result is two slim towers that look like a gateway to the sky.

How it was built

The two towers were built first from reinforced concrete. The sky deck connecting them was put together at ground level and then lifted upwards with hydraulic equipment, the first time this method was used on a construction project. At the foot of the towers there are walkways and a garden with flowing water, and in the basement a market recreates the feel of early twentieth-century Osaka.

On the globe

The model shows the twin towers joined near the top by the Floating Garden Observatory, whose roof has a big round opening.