Yamanashi Broadcasting and Press Center NOW

About The Entry

In 1966, Kenzo Tange devised a powerful apparatus of disseminating mass media, Yamanashi Broadcasting and Press Center. A concrete innovation and an urban fragment, the Yamanashi Building applied the joint-core system that could fulfill his imagination of an indefinitely intensified production environment at an urban center. Nonetheless, Tange could neither foresee social challenges, such as a sinking economy and aging society, nor could he realize the fragile nature of mass media. His efforts of self-containing a monochrome production service inside a monolithic structure led the Yamanashi Building, like many other concrete urban renewal buildings during the postwar era, to quickly derail from its original metabolism projection .

This project attempts to adapt the existing concrete structure to reengage with the contemporary social and urban context. The re-hybridization of the production-centric program, through reintroducing a lifestyle of production, living, and consumption, reinstates the visibility and dynamics of production. Aiming to reactivate the building vertically, the proposal challenges the construction of servant space, decentralizing the structure through liberating circulation and redefining the boundary of public and private. By occupying the surface of structure, the intervention creates a transparency that contrasts with the historical image at multiple scales, attracting a population of diverse ages. At an urban scale, the adaptation physically and programmatically mediates the institutional scale urban renewal and adjacent neighborhood, reinvigorating vacant blocks. Once an iconic urban concrete relic, the Yamanashi Building becomes an urban incubator that celebrates the history of production with a contemporary fashion.