Cruise control: built like a ship, Yokohama's new port terminal is an audacious fusion of architecture and engineering that creates a topographic landscape for public activities

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2003 by Michael Webb

The uplighting within the three halls can be boosted with downlights as needed; however, there is less natural lighting than the architects had intended. Though customs officers work here for only a few hours a week at most, they insisted on enclosed offices, walled in translucent glass, obscuring the side windows. Former retail tenants, however tacky, were allotted similar areas along the edge of the arrivals hall, and the cafe, which could have been entirely transparent, was enclosed. As a result, the halls have to be artificially lit even on bright days, and the sweeping panorama of the harbour is blocked.

But these are minor criticisms of a remarkable achievement. It's a miracle that so audacious a building was completed in just over two years (by three contractors working closely together), and that solutions were found to the engineering challenges and client change orders while going only two per cent over the original budget of 23 billion yen (129 million pounds). In contrast to the Sydney Opera House, which dominates its waterfront and has become an internationally recognized icon, or the Constructivist exuberance of Michael Rotondi's Dragon Promenade in Nagasaki harbour (AR December 1998), the Port Terminal is intentionally low-profile, deferring to the floating hotels; from a distance it resembles an earthwork more than a building. The roof promenade divides at the entry and extends forward in two steep banks to embrace the approach road and draw people up to explore its folded and rounded terrain. From this sensuously modelled landscape, evoking without mimicking the roll of the ocean, the new trophy buildings that line the waterfront look like a row of Alessi tchotchkes. And the interiors have the sweep and authority that Le Corbusier recognized in the George Washington Bridge; architecture and engineering indissolubly fused.

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Foreign Office Architects, London

Project team (detailed design and construction)

Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Shoukan Endo. Kensuke Kishikawa, Yasuhisa Kikuchi. Izumi Kobayashi, Kenichi Matsuzawa, Tomofumi Nagayama, xavier Ortiz. Lluis Viu Robes. Keisuke Tamura

Structural engineer

Structural Design Group

Services engineer

P. T. Morimura & Associates

Associate architect

GKK

Photographs

Satoru Mishima