2003

NORTHERN OSAKA STATION AREA
International Concept Competition

Osaka. Japan
Area: 24 ha
Organizer: Japan Railway Construction Corporation.
City of Osaka

original city landscape

Incorporating an empty space to the urban structure essentially implies a strategy to give that empty space new senses. Thus, the concept for this project is to create a structure of ribbons that remits to the transport flow and which is no longer one of products and loads but one of actors and diverse urban practices. The extension of these ribbons defines a new topography of the territory, connecting what has been up to now separated. Below the ribbons are the new urban programs: the office, the trade, the entertainment, the production, even the housing. Above them is the public space which gives identity, the sighting platform of the urban fact, the perspective of the artificial landscape.

The spaces which are delimited by what is built are an area of support of the public practices, and a roof of the underground links. A transfer square frames the rail terminals, hides the new subway station, receives and projects the system of ribbons. A park extends and prolongs the transfer square towards the rest of the property. Organized in layered sections, jagged by the cross-streets, it is proposed as a group of diverse structures which lose urbanity and gain a natural appearance as they move away from the transfer square towards the river. Different afforestation, topographies and programs introduce the diversity. Movement and space, building and territory, memory and projection, public and private, entirety and fragment, specified and suggested, defined and unfinished are the terms that this proposal articulates.

phases diagrams

pieces diagrams

view from the park – model

view from the transfer square – model