Tokyo Big Sight - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

is the popular nickname

Nickname

A nickname is "a usually familiar or humorous but sometimes pointed or cruel name given to a person or place, as a supposedly appropriate replacement for or addition to the proper name.", or a name similar in origin and pronunciation from the original name....

for the , a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese convention center

Convention center

A convention center is a large building that is designed to hold a convention, where individuals and groups gather to promote and share common interests. Convention centers typically offer sufficient floor area to accommodate several thousand attendees...

that opened in April 1996. Located in Odaiba

Odaiba

is a large artificial island in Tokyo Bay, Japan, across the Rainbow Bridge from central Tokyo. It was initially built for defensive purposes in the 1850s, dramatically expanded during the late 20th century as a seaport district, and has developed since the 1990s as a major commercial, residential...

, Tokyo Bay

Tokyo Bay

is a bay in the southern Kantō region of Japan. Its old name was .-Geography:Tokyo Bay is surrounded by the Bōsō Peninsula to the east and the Miura Peninsula to the west. In a narrow sense, Tokyo Bay is the area north of the straight line formed by the on the Miura Peninsula on one end and on...

, the center is one of the largest convention venues within the city, and its most iconic representation is the visually distinctive Conference Tower.

Construction

Contracted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Bureau of Finance, the construction of the entire site was handled by eight contractors in total, among them companies such as the Hazama and Shimizu Corporations. Construction efforts began in October 1992 and were finalized in October 1995, the contract in total worth no less than 40,392 million Yen

Japanese yen

The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar and the euro. It is also widely used as a reserve currency after the U.S. dollar, the euro and the pound sterling...

. Forty-five percent of that sum went towards the sole handler of the Tower segment, the Hazama Corporation.

The former Governor of Tokyo

Politics of Tokyo

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is headed by a publicly elected governor and metropolitan assembly. Its administrative structure is similar to that of Japan's other prefectures. The headquarters building is in the ward of Shinjuku...

, Shunichi Suzuki, had the honour of commencing the 1994 lifting-up ceremony on June 30, which initiated the operation of raising the Tower's 6500-ton main structure above ground, a process which took three days to complete using a computer-guided system that precisely jacked the structure up into place. A 250-ton aerial escalator

Escalator

An escalator is a moving staircase – a conveyor transport device for carrying people between floors of a building. The device consists of a motor-driven chain of individual, linked steps that move up or down on tracks, allowing the step treads to remain horizontal.Escalators are used around the...

was installed later to formally link the raised structure to the ground floors.

Overview

Located within Ariake

Ariake, Tokyo

is a location within Kōtō, Tokyo, Japan. It is best known as the region adjacent to and directly east of Odaiba. Airake is subdivided into four chome and comprises part of the Tokyo Bay Landfill #10 and Tokyo Rinkai Satellite City Center....

in Kōtō

Koto, Tokyo

is one of the 23 special wards of Tokyo, Japan. As of 2008, the ward has an estimated population of 442,271 and a population density of 11,070 persons per km². The total area is 39.48 km². The ward refers to itself as Kōtō City in English....

, Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

, the Big Sight's most distinctive feature is the unique architecture of its 58 m-high eight-storey Conference Tower

Tower

A tower is a tall structure, usually taller than it is wide, often by a significant margin. Towers are distinguished from masts by their lack of guy-wires....

. The site utilizes steel frame

Steel frame

Steel frame usually refers to a building technique with a "skeleton frame" of vertical steel columns and horizontal -beams, constructed in a rectangular grid to support the floors, roof and walls of a building which are all attached to the frame...

with reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete is concrete in which reinforcement bars , reinforcement grids, plates or fibers have been incorporated to strengthen the concrete in tension. It was invented by French gardener Joseph Monier in 1849 and patented in 1867. The term Ferro Concrete refers only to concrete that is...

construction, boasting a total floor area of 230,873 m² which outsizes Makuhari Messe

Makuhari Messe

is a Japanese convention center outside Tokyo, located in the Mihama-ku ward of Chiba city, in the northwest corner of Chiba prefecture. Designed by Fumihiko Maki, it is easily accessible by Tokyo's commuter rail system. Makuhari is the name of the area, and Messe is a German word meaning "trade...

's floor space by half, and of which 35% is indoors. The convention center is divided into three main areas, each with their own supporting facilities such as restaurant

Restaurant

A restaurant is an establishment which prepares and serves food and drink to customers in return for money. Meals are generally served and eaten on premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and food delivery services...

s: The East Exhibition Hall, the West Exhibition Hall and the Conference Tower.

Conference Tower

The thing most associated with the Tokyo Big Sight name, the glass and titanium

Titanium

Titanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ti and atomic number 22. It has a low density and is a strong, lustrous, corrosion-resistant transition metal with a silver color....

-panelled Conference Tower appears as a set of four inverted pyramid

Pyramid

A pyramid is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge at a single point. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygon shape, meaning that a pyramid has at least three triangular surfaces...

s mounted upon large supports. The first floor comprises a 1100-seat reception hall and four conference rooms of varying size. The second floor comprises the Entrance Plaza which is the main access area, the glass

Glass

Glass is an amorphous solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives...

-roofed Event Plaza, the Entrance Hall which leads to the exhibition halls proper, and the Exhibition Plaza. There are no floors three through five due to the structure's above-ground stature.

Floors six and seven can be directly accessed via escalator

Escalator

from the second-floor Entrance Hall, and comprise the main convention facilities of the Tower. The sixth floor houses ten conference rooms of small to medium size, some of which can be merged into larger spaces by removing intervening partitions. Floor seven houses the 1000-seat International Conference Room as well as three conference rooms of much smaller size. Floor eight houses five conference rooms.

Scattered around the Tower's vicinity are public art

Public art

The term public art properly refers to works of art in any media that have been planned and executed with the specific intention of being sited or staged in the physical public domain, usually outside and accessible to all...

pieces, most of which are works by international artists such as Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...

and his wife Coosje Van Bruggen, Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin RA is a contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He is noted for his fostering of the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree...

and Lee U-Fan

Lee U-Fan

Lee U-Fan is a Korean. minimalist painter and sculptor and leader of the Japanese material school Monoha in the late 1960s. Lee advocated a methodology of de-westernization and demodernization in both theory and practice as an antidote to the Eurocentric thought of 1960s postwar Japanese society...

. These include a giant sculpture of a saw, a large stylized pond and three marble

Marble

Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals, most commonly calcite or dolomite.Geologists use the term "marble" to refer to metamorphosed limestone; however stonemasons use the term more broadly to encompass unmetamorphosed limestone.Marble is commonly used for...

beds.

East Exhibition Hall

The East Exhibition Hall's main layout consists of a central 600 m-long two-tiered galleria

Galleria

Galleria , or The Galleria, is a common name for a shopping mall, ultimately deriving from the 19th-century Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.- Australia :*Centro Galleria - Morley, Western Australia...

, flanked on both sides by three mostly identical exhibition halls, and has underground parking available. The overall height of the structure is three storeys, with the galleria reaching two storeys. The glass-roofed galleria is equipped with moving walkways for easier movement, food outlets, escalators, electronic signboards and a host of other relevant facilities.

Each hall has a mobile roof that enables exhibitors to control the amount of sunlight

Sunlight

Sunlight, in the broad sense, is the total frequency spectrum of electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun. On Earth, sunlight is filtered through the Earth's atmosphere, and solar radiation is obvious as daylight when the Sun is above the horizon.When the direct solar radiation is not blocked...

coming through, recessed electronic and control service pits at regular intervals (six meters), a show office, four meeting rooms and a dressing room. It is possible to merge a hall with adjacent halls on the same side, allowing for a maximum continuous floor space three times the capacity of a single hall, or a grand total of 26,010 m².

Unlike its West counterpart, the East Exhibition Hall is not located next to the main Conference Tower area.

West Exhibition Hall

The West Exhibition Hall's layout consists of four internal halls surrounding a central two-tiered Atrium

Atrium (architecture)

In modern architecture, an atrium is a large open space, often several stories high and having a glazed roof and/or large windows, often situated within a larger multistory building and often located immediately beyond the main entrance doors...

. Halls one and two occupy the first floor, and are each equipped with a single meeting room, two show offices and seven meeting rooms. If necessary, they can be merged with the glass-roofed atrium area to maximize all available exhibition space. Halls three and four are individually smaller than the first floor halls, as the rest of the space not taken up by the Atrium's upper area is largely the rooftop exhibition area.

Adjacent to the West Exhibition Hall is an outdoor exhibition area, which like the rooftop area overlooks the waterfront. Like the other exhibition areas in the Tokyo Big Sight, it is possible to combine both upper halls and both spaces together to create a single continuous floor area. All in all, the West Exhibition Hall boasts in total six show offices, twenty-three meeting rooms and three dressing rooms. The gross total floor area of the Hall stands at 46,280 m².

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