GC Osaka Building is a modern office building located in the center of Osaka, with its elegantly proportioned facade and fine glazing detailing, owes its appearance, strangely enough, to the strict requirements of its fire protection system. Following a change in the bias of Japan’s Building Standard Law from specification to performance based, Shigeru Ban has taken the opportunity to use the necessarily strict fire safety rules to drive the design solution. The method is to ensure the required fire resistance by covering the steel structure wood.

This is called ‘flammable barrier’ design, which is incorporated in the conventional steel structural frame, and then it covered with special fire-resistant timber that also acts as the external finish. By doing this the GC Osaka Building design is allowing costs and resource to be minimized. Following the results of experiments, two layers of 2.5 cm-thick particle board was used to create a tartan grid across the facades, covering the regular horizontal and vertical arrangement of floor slabs and columns.

The building structure is made up of one-story-high Vierendeel trusses on every other floor which span 22 meters. Small rooms are located on the floors with trusses, and large rooms such as the showroom are placed on the column-free floors. To strengthen the statement, the glass curtain wall systems repeat the rhythm and create a shadow-gap between the structural frame and the facade. It even can be clearly seen even from the exterior.

The fire escape strategy for the building was also pursued as a design opportunity: a single-run steel staircase travels from ground level up the southern boundary of the site, linked to the building by series of bridges at each level. The boundary wall itself is five storeys high, held up by a star arrangement of steel struts, creating a leafy outlook from the offices.

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