Fish Market

A commercial fish market like Toyosu, Tokyo’s largest market, serves both domestic and global clients, and its scale, stock, and hours of operation reflect this. The fish market in Bakurocho, by contrast, operates on a local scale and serves the immediate needs of the neighborhood. Its supply comes from the surplus, unsold, or otherwise unmarketable stock left over from Toyosu’s morning sales. Whereas visitors to Toyosu experience a setting characterized by fragmentation and physical separation, here they are allowed to encounter one another.

The Bakurocho fish market allows for a consolidation of the multiple stages of exchange in the urban food supply. The building consists of one main volume supported by two infrastructural towers—one tower is dedicated to the movement of people, and the other to the movement of fish.