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

“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