Tokyo Tower

When Tachū Naitō designed Tokyo Tower in 1958, he was chasing the Eiffel Tower and beating it: 333 meters against Paris’s 324, using roughly a third less steel by weight. Construction ran through a postwar economy still short on raw materials, so about a third of the steel in the tower’s upper sections came from scrapped American tanks damaged in the Korean War. The tower opened to the public on December 23, 1958, painted International Orange and white to satisfy aviation safety rules, and immediately became the tallest self-supporting steel structure in the world.

Naitō had a type. Four years earlier he designed the Nagoya TV Tower. Two years after that, Tsutenkaku in Osaka. The year before Tokyo Tower, Sapporo’s tower and Beppu’s. He was Japan’s foremost expert in earthquake-resistant design, and postwar Japan needed broadcasting towers roughly as badly as it needed proof it could still build things that stood up. Tokyo Tower is the tallest of his surviving structures and the one people photograph, but it was never really a solo act. It’s the biggest entry in a body of work built, quite literally, on the wreckage of a war.