`2003 UK Award Part 2`
Ark Umeda: Urban Metabolism in Osaka

Nathan Jones’s proposal, part of a larger intervention into the extremely dense and often chaotic context of Osaka, Japan, seeks to develop a vertical metabolism by rethinking the nature of the megastructure. By drawing upon the existing institutional richness of the department store (depato), often called “a city in a building,” Jones shows how such a configuration can have several layers of order, and therefore several layers of potential development in history without losing the primary urban hierarchy.

Nathan JonesUniversity of Cambridge Department of Architecture

View Project Boards

View of central space. © Nathan Jones.

JuryLarry Oltmanns Michel Mossessian Rowan Moore

“Ark Umeda” proposes a reinterpretation of the Japanese department store as a typology and of the megastructure as a form of urbanism. It seeks to establish a topographic order, with a particular interest (in the context of hyperdensity) in creating an urban metabolism that works vertically. The resulting scale and infrastructural permanence suggest the need to rethink the concept of megastructure—allowing for adaptability, obsolescence, and deconstruction, but avoiding the systematic structural solutions of previous examples. The alternative proposed is a hierarchy of structural dependency that establishes institutional spaces within inhabited structural depth—thus overlaying urban and structural permanence

Structural axonometric. © Nathan Jones.

View of “front of house.” © Nathan Jones.

Nathan Jones
University of Cambridge
Department of Architecture

Nathan Jones

is associate director at Allies and Morrison, a practice of architects and urbanists based in London. He has a wide range of experience, encompassing a spectrum of architectural and urban design projects from large-scale strategies to the design of new public spaces, through a range of building typologies. Jones trained at Cambridge University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kingston University, and is an experienced studio tutor having previously taught at Cambridge University, London Metropolitan University, and MIT. After a period away from the practice, which included time as the director leading 5th Studio’s London office, Jones returned to Allies and Morrison to focus on design across the practice’s breadth of projects.

2003 UK Award Part 2 Ark Umeda: Urban Metabolism in Osaka

`2003 UK Award Part 2`
Ark Umeda: Urban Metabolism in Osaka