Reppinkan Hall, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo

A Museum That Never Opened, Named as Though It Had

The Reppinkan of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo (東京大学工学部列品館, Tōkyō Daigaku Kōgakubu Reppinkan) is a three-storey reinforced-concrete building on the Hongo campus in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, completed in 1925 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 9 October 1998.

The name is a fossil of an intention. Reppin means to set objects out in rows for display, and the building was planned as a museum where the faculty would show its academic specimens. It never took up that role. The engineering faculty headquarters occupies it now, and the offices inside carry no trace of the display halls that were meant to fill them. The name survived the plan.

For a while the intention was partly honoured. Survey materials gathered in China and Korea by Ito Chuta, Sekino Tadashi and others were displayed here, the fruits of expeditions that had done a great deal to establish East Asian architectural history as a field. Ito had designed the university's main gate thirteen years earlier; Sekino's surveys of Korean architecture remain foundational documents. That those collections passed through this building is one of the reasons its name still makes a kind of sense.

The funding origin is more mundane and rather charming. According to the university's own account, the building was put up with money left over from the construction budget of Faculty of Engineering Building 2.

Where Uchida Gothic Begins

Almost every pre-war building on the Hongo campus belongs to a manner known informally as Uchida Gothic, devised by Uchida Yoshikazu, professor of architecture and head of the university's building office, as what he called a style for reconstruction after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The Reppinkan of 1925 is the first building in that sequence. Everything else on this campus that looks like it descends from what happened here.

Its construction was itself caught by the earthquake. Work had already started when the quake struck, and the building was completed in a form that matched the reconstruction plan Uchida then drew up, making it the earliest structure to embody that plan.

The elements are all present in first form. The plan wraps around a courtyard in a square ring. A porch of continuous arches runs along the entrance side. Pilasters carry ornament at their upper ends. Windows are tall and narrow. What distinguishes this building from its successors is the treatment of the corners: each of the four is cut back as a re-entrant angle rather than turned as a simple right angle, which breaks the mass into planes that catch light differently and gives the elevation a depth the later, larger buildings do not attempt.

The registered structure is reinforced concrete, three storeys, building area 766 square metres, a modest figure beside the 3,263 square metres of Building 1 nearby. The criterion applied at registration was that the building is a model of its kind in design terms.

Registration, it is worth being clear, is not the same as designation. Japan's designation system produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties and controls alteration tightly. The registration system, created in 1996 for buildings of roughly fifty years or more, asks only for notification before substantial change and is built around the assumption that the structure stays in use. A working administrative building of a university faculty fits that assumption exactly.

Finding It

The Reppinkan stands to the left and slightly back from the main gate, close enough that a visitor walking the ginkgo avenue towards Yasuda Auditorium will pass within thirty metres of it without necessarily noticing. Turn left instead of continuing straight and it appears almost at once.

Approach from the courtyard side if the route allows, because the arcaded porch reads better in sequence than head-on, each arch framing the next as the angle of view shifts. Then step back far enough to take in a corner. The re-entrant angles are the detail most people miss and the one that separates this building from everything Uchida designed afterwards.

Interiors of faculty buildings are in principle closed to visitors, and as an administrative building this one has no public rooms. Views are exterior only. Entry to the campus itself is free and needs no application for parties of fewer than about fifteen, with groups of fifteen or more registering through the university's online form seven days ahead. Visiting hours are 7:00 to 18:00. The campus closes to visitors on national entrance examination days in mid-January and on the university's second-stage examination days in late February.

Photography outdoors is allowed for personal use; the university asks that the images not appear in publications or on social media. Nearest stations are Hongo-sanchome on the Marunouchi and Oedo subway lines, about eight minutes on foot to the main gate, and Todaimae on the Namboku line, about five to the northern gates.

Since this building marks the start of Uchida's campus vocabulary, seeing it first and the others afterwards makes the sequence legible. Building 1 lies a few minutes north, Faculty of Letters and Law Buildings 1 and 2 face each other on the axis running east from the main gate, and Yasuda Auditorium closes that axis at the far end. All within a fifteen-minute walk of each other.