University of Tokyo Faculty of Engineering Building 1

Three Generations of Architects, One Piece of Ground

Faculty of Engineering Building 1 at the University of Tokyo (東京大学工学部１号館, Tōkyō Daigaku Kōgakubu Ichigōkan) is a large teaching and research building on the Hongo campus in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, completed in 1935 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 9 October 1998.

The plot it occupies has a claim few sites in Japanese architectural education can match. In 1888 the first building of the engineering faculty at Hongo went up here, the old College of Engineering Main Building, designed by Tatsuno Kingo, the architect of Tokyo Station and the Bank of Japan headquarters. That building had a clock tower and a generous courtyard that students treated as a square. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 damaged it beyond saving.

What replaced it, finished in 1935, was designed by Uchida Yoshikazu. Uchida held a professorship in the architecture department while simultaneously running the university's building office, and the reconstruction of the entire Hongo campus after the earthquake fell to him. Building 1 is one of the largest results, with a recorded building area of 3,263 square metres.

Then in 1996 the architecture department built for itself a third time. Koyama Hisao, professor in the same department, carried out a renovation that roofed over the internal light court. The covered space took on the function the old courtyard had held under Tatsuno: a place students gather in, and the setting for graduation ceremonies and other formal occasions. Three architects, three interventions, one site, across more than a century.

Reading the Facade

The front approach passes under a pointed Gothic arch. Above and to either side, the wall is articulated by pilasters standing at each structural bay, shaped to read as buttresses even though the loads are carried by a modern frame. The cladding is brick-coloured tile.

This vocabulary has a name. Among people who study the Hongo campus it is called Uchida Gothic, a manner Uchida worked out as what he described as a style for reconstruction after the earthquake. Its components are consistent and countable: pointed arches at entrances, pilasters with decorated tips, tall narrow windows, scratch tile in dull red, and plans that wrap around a courtyard. Once the vocabulary is learned, most of the pre-war buildings on this campus become legible as variations on one theme, and this building is among the fullest statements of it.

A note on the structural record. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registers the structure as reinforced concrete, four storeys. The Agency's own explanatory text for the same entry describes steel-reinforced concrete with brick tile facing. Steel-reinforced concrete embeds steel sections within the concrete and was the more demanding option for large post-earthquake buildings, so the explanatory note is plausible; the registered field is nevertheless the figure of record, and the difference is worth flagging rather than resolving.

The registration itself belongs to the lighter of Japan's two heritage systems. Registration, established in 1996 for buildings of roughly fifty years or more, asks the owner to notify the government before substantial alteration and otherwise leaves the building in service. That the 1996 renovation could reshape the interior court, three years before this entry, shows what the category permits and why a working university campus fits it. The criterion applied here was that the building is a model of its kind in design terms.

Visiting

The building sits on the northern side of the Hongo campus, in the engineering precinct, reached most directly through the Ikenohata or Yayoi gates rather than the main gate. Todaimae station on the Namboku subway line is the closest, about five minutes on foot; Hongo-sanchome on the Marunouchi and Oedo lines is roughly twelve.

Interiors of faculty buildings are in principle closed to visitors, and that rule covers this one: corridors, lecture rooms and laboratories are not part of a general campus visit. The exterior can be walked around freely. Anyone wanting to see inside should look for an open-campus day, a public lecture, or an event advertised by the faculty, and enquiries about laboratory visits go directly to the faculty office rather than to the university's general visitor desk.

Entry to the campus is free. No application is needed for parties of fewer than about fifteen; groups of fifteen or more register through the university's online form at least seven days ahead. Visiting hours are 7:00 to 18:00. The campus is closed to visitors on national entrance examination days in mid-January and on the university's second-stage examination days in late February. There is no visitor parking.

Photography outdoors is permitted for personal use, with the university asking that images not be published in print or posted to social media. Commercial shooting requires prior permission.

A short walk is worth planning. Building 1, the Reppinkan a little to the south, and the Faculty of Letters and Law buildings along the central axis were all designed by Uchida within roughly a decade of each other, and comparing the treatment of arch, pilaster and tile across the four makes the argument of Uchida Gothic clearer than any single building can. The whole circuit takes under half an hour at an unhurried pace.