University of Tokyo Law and Letters Building 1

The Arcade Everyone Photographs

Faculty of Letters and Law Building 1 at the University of Tokyo (東京大学法文１号館, Tōkyō Daigaku Hōbun Ichigōkan) is a reinforced-concrete teaching 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.

Its ground floor is pierced by an arcade of pointed arches that carries a north-south walkway straight through the building. Stand at one end and the receding arches produce the effect that gets this corridor onto more phone screens than any structure on the campus except the auditorium: a repeating rhythm of pier and opening that the university's own architectural historians compare to the three-aisled interior of a church.

The comparison is not decorative. The pointed arch on this campus has a traceable ancestry. It came in with Josiah Conder, the English architect who taught the first generation of Japanese architects at the Imperial College of Engineering, and it passed through the old College of Letters and Law buildings and the old library before arriving here. It kept going afterwards: the Faculty of Letters Building 3, completed in 1987, picks up the same motif more than half a century later.

One piece of the earlier campus is physically present. The finial at the entrance porch was taken from the old building on this site and reused. Where the rest of the pre-earthquake campus is gone, that single ornament survived by being lifted off one building and set on another.

Two Axes, and a Building Built in Two Halves

The Hongo campus has a governing line: the main gate at one end, the ginkgo avenue, Yasuda Auditorium at the other. Less obvious is the second axis running perpendicular to it, and Building 1 is one of the two structures that define it, facing Building 2 across the intervening space. The arcade exists because the building had to let the cross-traffic through without breaking the frontage.

Construction happened in stages. The university records that the western portion, now used as classrooms by the Faculty of Letters, was finished in February 1929, and that the building as a whole was completed in February 1935. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registers the later date. Six years separate the two halves, and the joint is not obvious from outside, which was the point.

The designer was Uchida Yoshikazu, professor of architecture and head of the university's building office, who directed the entire post-earthquake reconstruction. The registered structure is reinforced concrete, three storeys with a part of four, building area 2,695 square metres.

A later addition is worth knowing about before you look up. In the 1970s and 1980s the roof gained a penthouse storey, designed by Koyama Hisao and built as a series of quarter-circle vaults, an idea drawn from the attic floors of Parisian apartment buildings. It was carried out on Building 2 as well, and on Faculty of Engineering Building 6. The work was consciously matched to the existing design at the outer corners, which is why a visitor rarely notices that the top of the building is forty years younger than the rest.

Registration is the lighter of Japan's two heritage categories. Introduced in 1996 for buildings of roughly fifty years or more, it asks the owner to notify the government before significant alteration and assumes the building stays in service. This one holds lecture rooms in daily use. The criterion applied was that the building is a model of its kind in design terms.

Visiting

The arcade is a public walkway, which makes this the most accessible of the pre-war buildings on campus: you can pass through it. Lecture rooms and offices upstairs are closed, as faculty interiors are in principle, but the ground-floor passage is part of the ordinary circulation of the campus and no permission is needed to use it.

Go in the morning if the arches matter to you. Low light entering from one end travels the length of the passage and picks out the pier profiles; by midday the corridor flattens. The walkway is also busy between classes, so a few minutes after the hour is quieter than a few minutes before.

Compare the arch profile here with the one at the Reppinkan a short walk north, where the arches are round rather than pointed. Uchida used both, and seeing them within ten minutes of each other makes clear that the choice was deliberate rather than habitual.

Campus entry is free and needs no application 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 closes to visitors on national entrance examination days in mid-January and on the university's second-stage examination days in late February. Visitors are asked to keep noise down, since teaching is going on all around, and there is no visitor parking.

Photography is permitted for personal use, with the university asking that images not be published in print or on social media. Nearest station is Hongo-sanchome on the Marunouchi and Oedo subway lines, about eight minutes to the main gate, from which the building is roughly two minutes further along the avenue.