This new entrepot is unique not only for its open plan and marketplace character, but for its span of several city blocks under single land ownership, a rare opportunity to create a comprehensive and unified commercial development within Japan’s often feudal land patterns.

Tama Plaza is the commercial heart of a new town center in Tama, a city seeking to regain its competitive commercial edge over neighboring cities. Located at the central transportation hub, the alternating open air and enclosed commercial center lies one level above ground, just steps above major automobile thoroughfares, bus lines, and train tracks. This new entrepot is unique not only for its open plan and marketplace character, but also for its span of several city blocks under singular land ownership, a rare opportunity to create a comprehensive and unified commercial development within Japan’s often feudal land patterns. This new type of unified development will serve as a catalyst and character model for all surrounding developments.

This new town center is organized in a series of plazas, open air and enclosed, connecting people and places and encouraging pedestrians into store hopping, window browsing, and people watching. The architecture defining each open space and the facades, which rise from the street below to engulf the forms above, employs ‘Wabi Sabi’ or the Japanese art of impermanence, and suggests such qualities as transparency, penetrability, humility, asymmetry and imperfection.