
Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium’s rooflines and connected volumes make a large sports complex feel like a sequence of smaller buildings. Fumihiko Maki’s 1990 design organizes an arena, sub-arena, and pool around exterior public spaces.
Guide preview
Different roof shapes appear to overlap as you move along the perimeter, and that changing silhouette is deliberate. Architect Fumihiko Maki designed the current Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium as a collection of connected volumes rather than one unbroken arena block. The complex, completed in 1990, brings together a main arena, sub-arena, and indoor pool.
Continue exploring
Discover the full story
Keep reading with a travel pass and explore every full guide and tour.
UpgradeQuick facts
- The gymnasium’s site area is 45,800 square metres.
- The main arena accommodates up to 9,308 spectators.
- The venue hosted table tennis at the Tokyo 2020 Games.
More places in Tokyo

Akihabara
Akihabara’s present anime, game, and electronics shops grew from a postwar trade in electrical parts. The district’s small specialist stores and large retailers preserve traces of a neighborhood that repeatedly reinvented itself alongside Japan’s consumer technology.

Ameya-Yokocho
Ameya-Yokocho runs beneath and beside railway lines between Ueno and Okachimachi. The market’s postwar history as a black-market selling American goods helps explain why today’s crowded street still feels international, improvised, and intensely commercial.

Daikanyama
Daikanyama’s low-rise streets make room for a rare long experiment in city building: Hillside Terrace grew in phases over more than two decades, mixing homes, shops, offices, galleries, and small public spaces.

Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum
The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum preserves buildings by moving them out of vulnerable original settings and arranging them in walkable groups. Streets, shops, and homes make changes in Tokyo’s everyday architecture visible at human scale.

Ghibli Museum
The Ghibli Museum’s compact, garden-set building hides its rooms behind colored glass, curved passageways, and changing levels. Its design asks visitors to discover how a museum works by moving through it rather than following a fixed gallery sequence.

Ginza
Ginza’s broad central streets emerged from an ambitious post-fire rebuilding scheme in the Meiji era. Today’s department stores and historic retailers occupy a district whose grid, sidewalks, and commercial identity were shaped by that nineteenth-century transformation.