Japan Guide
Tokyo
Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building
This monumental 400,000-square-metre complex from which the city is administered was designed by Tange Kenzō. Thirteen thousand city bureaucrats go to work each day at the TMGB, and the entire complex feels like Gotham City. Tange was actually aiming to evoke Paris's Notre Dame, and there's certainly something of that cathedral's design in the shape of the twin towers. But the building's real triumph is that it is unmistakably Japanese; the dense crisscross pattern of its glass and granite facade is reminiscent of both traditional architecture and the circuitry of an enormous computer chip.