Kyoto Station: A Gargantuan Postmodern Architectural Masterpiece in an Ancient City

When travelers arrive in Japan’s ancient capital, they expect wooden temples and Zen gardens. Instead, they are greeted by a sci-fi colossus. One of the world’s great anomalies, Kyoto Station by Hiroshi Hara (1997) is a town-sized, public megastructure, fully built in one go to the coherent and total vision of a brilliant architect, effectively acting as a vast manifesto… It is rare in modern urban planning to see a project of this magnitude executed without compromise. Hara’s design doesn’t just house trains; it challenges the very definition of a terminal, it is an experiment in the creation of a single building that is so vast that it becomes three-dimensional urban planning, entirely guided by a wild and singular artistic vision.

Explore our Kyoto Station collection featuring prints, mugs, apparel and much more.

Walking into the central concourse, you aren't just entering a room; you are entering a landscape. It is or maybe as close as one might get to actually BEING inside the architect’s imagination… not only is it almost too vast to fully comprehend, like Lutyens’ great design for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, it knows how to emphasise its scale… The reference to Lutyens is crucial here; like that unbuilt masterpiece, Kyoto Station uses volume to evoke a spiritual sense of awe. It feels like a cathedral of transit. This overwhelming sensation of "being inside the imagination" is what drove us to capture this masterpiece in an architecture illustration collection.

through the careful piling up of human scale elements Hara makes the already vast scale of the station feel utterly, epically monumental...

The building rewards those who look closely. Every surface and element is treated not only as an opportunity to impress a sense of scale, but also to trigger the imagination, with a plethora of different materials, types of stone, historical references and strange abstract symbols at each turn. It acts almost like a physical encyclopedia of materials, blending industrial steel with natural stone. Hara incorporated a "geographical" concept here, where the station is meant to reflect the city’s grid and history through these abstract symbols.

The verticality of the station creates a geology of layers and materials that feels incredibly dramatic. The piling up of different structural members, architectural motifs, materials and stone, together with the towering height, is the closest one can come to feeling the sense of awe that you get from Piranesi’s etchings. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was famous for his Carceri (Imaginary Prisons)—sketches of impossible, cavernous vaults and stairs. Kyoto Station captures that same sublime, dizzying complexity in real life. It’s not just a building, it’s a mood.

For the casual tourist, the most surprising feature is hidden in plain sight. Now, if you can believe it… ABOVE that giant concourse space is an absolutely humungous public staircase that continues up a lot further to a whole outdoor roofspace that culminates in a roof ‘park’ overlooking the city. This is the Daikaidan (Grand Staircase). It serves as a vertical plaza, often hosting concerts and light shows. It transforms the station from a place of transit into a destination for leisure, proving that public infrastructure can also be a public playground.

The ascent to the top is an experience in itself. These are some of the views as you go up, up, up, up seemingly endlessly in the absolutely bonkers mega-mega-megastructure.

Inside again, just look at the figures on the bottom left for a sense of scale… The people look like ants. This is intentional; Hara designed the concourse to feel, and have the same sense of scale, as a valley between mountains, but a man-made, ultra-high-tech, dizzying, futuristic postmodern version of something with that sense of sublime natural vastness...

Looking along the interior elevation of the main concourse, you can see the complexity of Hara's "Matrix" design. The station isn't just a big roof; it's a machine for millions to dwell in and move through. Bridges cross the void, shops are tucked into alcoves, and trains rumble below. It is a cross-section of a futuristic city, encapsulated in a single building envelope.

The exterior of Kyoto station just as thrilling as its interior, it is truly the only megastructure that has been realised to this scale, in a postmodern idiom… 

The building feels geological in terms of volume on the interior, on the outside it feels geological in terms of its huge and emphasised solidity and weight. It is a veritable natural formation of strangely hyperactive mass and heft. The chaotic energy of the exterior mirrors the bustling city around it. It avoids the sleek, featureless smoothness of modern "glass box" architecture in favor of something textured, heavy, massive, and weirdly, vibratingly alive.

Here for a sense of scale on the inside again, see the people on the escalator in relation to the structure holding up the concourse roof...

One of the cushions from our >>Kyoto Station collection<< (the first illustration at the top of this blog is the interior view from our collection). We are so obsessed with this building that its one of the illustration collections we spent the most time on in our whole store. Whether you're a pop-culture fan of the building as the site of the final battle in the kaiju film Gamera 3, or you are architecture geeks like us, or just adore Kyoto in all its glorious contrasts, you'll find something in the collection to remind you of this exceptional building... For all our collections for buildings in Japan CLICK HERE