Fuji Television Building

The Fuji Television Building stands on the waterfront district of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay, completed in 1996 to a design by the architect Kenzo Tange, serving as the headquarters of the Fuji Television Network. Its most distinctive feature is a large titanium-clad sphere, known as the Hachitama, suspended roughly 100 meters above ground between two office towers and reachable by escalators that run diagonally through the connecting sky corridors, housing an observation deck open to the public. Tange designed the building's exposed structural framework and connecting bridges to be visually legible from outside, an approach drawing on the Metabolist ideas about adaptable, modular urban structures that had shaped much of his earlier career. The building has become one of the most recognizable pieces of architecture in the Odaiba district, itself a largely artificial island developed through land reclamation beginning in the late twentieth century.