Smart Park

Project Brief

Smart Park was designed in response to a design competition by ArchMedium called “Tokyo Replay Center” in the Autumn of 2012. For this competition, I asked three of my friends to join me and we spent approximately two weeks preparing our submission. At the time, we were all students from various years of architecture school and we used Rhino, V-Ray, and Adobe Design Suite for all of our final graphics. Here’s the design brief from ArchMedium:

“The aim of this competition is to develop a new leisure center in central Tokyo. The center must fit with the lifestyle of Japanese society while offering a new method of entertainment designed especially for them.

The Tokyo Replay Center is a new concept of entertainment. A complex with numerous private media rooms (similar to the popular karaoke rooms) where groups of friends can go to see old anime, to watch classic films, or to play video games in a private setting where they can feel comfortable.

For the same price that a karaoke session or an informal dinner would cost, people could rent a private room and be entertained with some of the best Japanese technological entertainment. The space has to be equipped with the best technology in audio and video quality while also offering an extensive menu of food and drinks to complete the experience.

The Tokyo Replay Center aspires to become a reference point in this culture of leisure, a must for the “otaku” (people with a keen interest in manga, anime, and video games) and all people interested in technology. It would be a place where you could find the latest”

Project Site

“Akihabara is internationally known as the meeting point for otaku people around the world. Gadgets and products are for sale everywhere. Innovation and tradition meet at a single point.

There is no better place for the Tokyo Replay Center than this central district of Tokyo. It is full of shops where you can buy new items, used, share equipment, etc. Akihabara Station is also one of the most important stations in Tokyo.

The urban grid of Akihabara is made up of very narrow and very long plots. All of these conditions, put together with the high density of Tokyo’s urbanization forces most of the buildings in the neighborhood to grow in height.

The site chosen for the competition is in a typically Japanese plot, just a few meters from the station. The plot is relatively large and the building that was there previously has been recently demolished. For this exercise we will consider that the site has been divided into two smaller plots and we’ve been assigned with one of them (15m wide). To make the exercise more challenging the kind of building that will occupy the other plot is unknown, so the Tokyo Replay Center will have consider that a building will be build right next to it, although we don’t know what it will be.

The site has access by two streets, one pedestrian and one vehicular, and both streets are connected by a covered passage, the “My Way 2”. This passage must be respected and can be used as a tool for the building to relate with the public space of the street.”