Agri Hub

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Terra Carbon

Agri Hub

Firm

Studio Wei Yu

Type

Commercial › Office Retail
Industrial › Farm

STATUS

Concept

SIZE

25,000 sqft - 100,000 sqft

Tokyo tore down the Nakagin Capsule Tower. Fifty years after its inauguration, the city had outgrown it. But the question the building first asked remains unanswered: what does a city need, and how should architecture respond?
This project reimagines metabolism as a regenerative ecological principle, expanding the post-war Metabolist legacy into a framework for sustainable urban resilience. On the original site in Ginza, situated between the elevated highway and the Tsukiji food district, a new tower grows from the same concrete cores. Where the original movement envisioned buildings as interchangeable biological cells, this proposal extends that logic to the flows of energy, nutrients, and food that sustain a living city.
Three programs coexist within a single skeleton: agricultural research, vertical food production, and farm-to-table retail. They are not stacked but looped into a closed-loop system that minimises waste and maximises resource circularity. Research informs growing methods, the plant factory supplies the market below, and organic waste cycles back into the laboratory. The building functions less as a static object than as an urban metabolic organ, continuously processing inputs and outputs in dialogue with the surrounding city.
Each program occupies its own envelope on its own timeline. The research volumes are column-beam structured and daylit, designed to be renewed every five to ten years as programs evolve. The ETFE-clad production zone houses vertical farms that operate continuously. The cladding reduces embodied carbon while maximising daylight penetration for plant growth, reducing the need for artificial lighting. The retail floor turns over seasonally, flexible by leasing. The I-beam skeleton suspends all three volumes, angling the mass obliquely toward the street. This structural adaptability allows the building to grow incrementally rather than be demolished and rebuilt, a direct response to construction waste.
The building's logic is ecological rather than symbolic. Agricultural knowledge produced in the research floors feeds directly into production methods. Harvests move downward into the retail zone. Waste returns upward to complete the cycle. The architecture does not represent this system. It is organised around it. Together, these strategies position the project not as an icon of technological optimism, but as a working model of low-carbon, bioclimatic urbanism rooted in the regenerative potential of food.