Yokohama, Japan—We formulated our proposal for the Yokohama Port Terminal competition in response to what we perceived as the inherent duality between global systems of transport and exchange and the condition of the specific sites through which such systems cross. These conditions are exemplified by the port of Yokohama and specifically encoded within the program of the port terminal proper.

This liminal condition prompted us to develop our proposal to encompass the general functional imperatives of the cruise terminal (as a smoothly functioning link between land and water transport) and the specific civic possibilities suggested by the pier configuration itself. We thus conceived our proposal as an incomplete or partial building—partial both conceptually and formally—in recognition of the fact that such programs frame thresholds in two distinct yet overlapping continuums: in the cruise terminal’s cycle of embarkation and disembarkation and, at the civic level, as a place of rest and recreation in the course of an excursion. Consequently, completion, both physically and virtually, is effected only periodically—in the linkage of terminal to cruise ship or in the closure of the completed urban event.

Affiliated with its nineteenth-century antecedents, the large shed structure of the Yokohama Port Terminal evolved in part from our previous landscape projects that involved a series of awnings constructed from steel trusses and fabric. Whereas the nineteenth-century airship shed type is characterized by a totalizing conception that employs uniform and repetitive structural units enclosing a single homogeneous space, the structure of the proposed terminal engenders heterogeneity through selective perturbations and extensions of the structural frames. Each successive truss undergoes a transformation, such that the shed is composed of a variable unit repeated along a single trajectory. Not in service of an ideal geometry, the truss system manifests a progressive differentiation, yielding a complex of spaces that smoothly integrate multiple terminal, civic, and garden programs within and below the port terminal’s span.

Finalist, International Competition

Principals: Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto

Interns and assistants: Yama Karim, Don Keppler, Jason Payne, Rhett Russo, Fadi Hakim, Lawrence Blau, Khalid Al Najjar

Computer work: Sean Daly

Laser cutting: Rawbeam