Gate Tower Building with expressway through it completed in Osaka

The Gate Tower Building, a 16-storey office building in the Fukushima district of Osaka, Japan, was completed in 1992. Its best-known feature is that a Hanshin Expressway roadway, part of the elevated city motorway network around Osaka, passes straight through the building between the 5th and 7th floors.

The unusual design came from a planning problem. The expressway needed to build an entrance and exit ramp near Umeda, the city's main commercial and transport hub, but the owners of the land where the ramp was planned did not agree to give up the site. Rather than force a different route, the parties worked out a solution in which the building was constructed around the road, with the expressway running through an opening in the structure.

The road is structurally separate from the building, so traffic vibration is not meant to pass into the offices. The tower became a well-known Osaka landmark and a frequent example of creative land use in dense Japanese cities, where space is scarce and property rights are complex.