Obayashi Corporation, Japan

Osaka Station, located at the heart of Japan’s second-largest city, is marking its 150th anniversary and entering a major turning point through large-scale redevelopment. We designed the façade lighting of this ultra-slim high-rise building as a “new gateway to Osaka,” connecting the historic station facilities with a newly developed natural park.

The site stretches 160 meters east to west along the railway, forming a narrow strip. The building responds to this constraint with an ultra-slender volume. Its upper portion is wedge-shaped, diagonally cut, with dynamic colour LED lighting installed along the ridgeline. The visual effect of a meteor-like ascent toward the sky, created by a single line of light, strongly defines the building’s identity.

The lighting dynamically changes in response to seasonal transitions and urban events. Scenes evoke cherry blossoms in spring, fireworks in summer, autumn foliage, and snowy landscapes in winter. Additionally, a celebratory lighting performance features the official character “Myakumyaku” of the Osaka-Kansai Expo, which opened in April 2025, with its red and blue colours blinking in an organic rhythm—expressing the building’s role as a new symbol of the city.

The lower levels house dining establishments and are directly connected to the station, featuring semi-outdoor pedestrian spaces that open up to the city. Indirect lighting layered horizontally on the interior’s hanging walls harmonizes the lively alley-like atmosphere of Japanese izakaya streets with the refined façade of the building. The traditional “noren” curtain seen in Japanese restaurant façades is reinterpreted in a contemporary way through diagonally hanging metal panels illuminated by indirect lighting.

Inside, the lighting design utilizes massive masonry walls and highly reflective materials to create dramatic effects. The textured masonry walls, lit by linear and indirect lighting, reflect onto mirrored ceilings, producing a visual depth that expands the narrow site into a spacious experience. Amid the evolving landscape of Osaka Station and the city, the building captures people’s memories and consciousness, establishing a new relationship with the urban environment through its façade and public area lighting—as a station building that “wears time,” embodying the passage of time.

As a symbol of the building’s concept as the “new gateway to Osaka,” the design forms a gate-like gesture toward the adjacent natural park. In addition to the station’s name signage, an aluminum-cast lattice inspired by train schedule diagrams is installed. Its three-dimensional form reflects light in complex ways.

A single luminous trail flowing across the façade, combined with the continuity of patterns symbolizing the station’s history, creates a unique lighting effect—where reflections of light appear to continue endlessly, evoking a sense of timelessness from past to future.