A highway runs through a 16-storey building in Osaka, and it pays rent

Imagine sitting at your desk on the 8th floor while cars roar past a few levels below. In Osaka, that's not a thought experiment. The 16-storey Gate Tower Building has a multi-lane expressway passing right through it.

What happened?

The Gate Tower Building was completed in 1992, with the Hanshin Expressway running through its 5th, 6th and 7th floors. It has been turning heads around the world ever since.

The odd design is the result of a property dispute from the 1980s. The landowners wanted to put up a building. Osaka's city planners wanted to build the Hanshin Expressway across the very same spot.

After five years of talks, both sides agreed on a compromise: the road would go through the building. To make it legal, Japan made special changes to its expressway and building laws.

How does it actually work?

Here's the clever part. The expressway does not touch the building's structure at all. It sits like a bridge on its own steel and concrete piers, rising next to and outside the tower.

The building, in turn, wraps around the road like a giant tunnel without ever making contact. So the traffic doesn't affect the structure's overall balance.

What about the people who work inside? The floors the road passes through are lined with a special tunnel system with high-tech sound and vibration insulation, so noise and shaking stay away from offices.

The elevators also skip the road levels. They go straight from the 4th floor to the 8th, and the buttons for those floors are simply left blank.

Who pays for what?

This is probably the best bit. The company that runs the road, Hanshin Expressway, is officially the tenant of the 5th, 6th and 7th floors. It pays the building's management regular rent every month for using them.

So the next time someone complains about their landlord, remember: even an expressway has to pay rent in Osaka.

What's next?

Nothing is changing here. More than three decades after opening, the tower and the road still share the same vertical space, a compromise that ended a long fight and became a tourist curiosity along the way.