Edifice of the Week: DoCoMo Tower

This week we salute the DoCoMo Tower in Shinjuku. It rises to 492 feet. To put this in context, it is only about a third of the height of the Empire State Building. Still, it is one of the five tallest buildings in Tokyo, and towers over the other skyscrapers in its neighborhood. Aside from its height, this building has a number of features which make it memorable.

I see this building every day at work from this vantage point (the south). When I first viewed it, I thought something looked odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Later, I realized that for such a large building, it had very few windows. A colleague told me that the reason for this is that very few people work in the building--much of it is filled with computers and machinery. NTT DoCoMo, the building's owner, is the largest cell phone company in Japan. The entire top part of the structure is a cell phone tower.

From the north side, the building looks down on Shinjuku station, the busiest train station in the world. Every day 3.5 million people commute through it. A few years ago, DoCoMo installed a large clock near the top of the north side of the tower, so commuters could easily see the the time. The clock face has a radius of about 60 feet. When the clock was installed, the structure became the tallest clock tower in the world.

I understand that there is a lighting system that tells commuters whether or not they'll need an umbrella when they leave work--you just look to see what color the lights are on the top. I've just heard about this, and haven't yet got the hang of which lights represent which conditions.