In modern Tokyo, there were three towers symbolizing the times. Ryounkaku (1890), Tokyo Tower (1958), Tokyo Sky Tree (2012). The height is 52 m, 333 m, 634 m in order.

Ryounkaku was built in Asakusa. It was destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake in the brick 12 building of an octagonal plane and it was removed. As a brick tower, there are cases where a jam minaret (World Heritage) with a height of 62 m continues to be built in Afghanistan for more than 900 years in the earthquake country Afghanistan, but in Japan, after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Ryounkaku collapsed, the high brick tower It is not made.

If Ryounkaku still remained, it would have faced the Tokyo Sky Tree across the Sumida River. Because it is ten times or more as high as the other, I feel a chaotic feeling to face it, but I could have seen the evolution of the technology and design of tower-like structures that passed more than 100 years ago.

The sky tree rises in the sky with deforming into a circle gradually reducing the force of the wind gradually while stabilizing the structure with the bottom as an equilateral triangle. In the center of the tower, a 375 m reinforced concrete “core pillar” is arranged longer than the Tokyo Tower, and the outer cylinder and this “core column” are also devised to counteract the earthquake shake. This mechanism leads to the structure of the five-storied pagoda cultivated in a long history.

The image of the tower in the ancient to the east and west tends to be a city icon. Ryounkaku of Meiji and Taisho, Tokyo Tower of Showa, and Heisei Sky Tree. The genealogy of icons of modern Tokyo is still inherited indeed. (D.Kitagawa)

 

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