Keikyu Aburatsubo Marine Park
Daiken Sekkei designed the centerpiece of Aburatsubo Marine Park: the Aburatsubo Aquarium. Under the guidance of Yasuo Suehiro, a University of Tokyo Professor and the aquarium's first director, we attempted to produce a fish show that leveraged the capability and traits of the fish, centering on a 600-ton donut-shaped tank, the largest of its kind at the time. When the park opened its gates in 1968, the aquarium pioneered the concept of the aquarium as a place for a day of family-friendly entertainment, breaking away from the more traditional museum-like image.
Daiken Sekkei’s initial foray into aquarium design came in 1966 with the Keikyu Aburatsubo Marine Park, ordered after designing several train stations for the railway operator Keikyu Corporation. The project presented us with several new challenges, such as creating a 13.4 m diameter tank using tempered laminated glass measuring 2.4 m wide, 1.5 m tall, and 15 mm thick. With the rapid growth period at hand, leisure quickly grew more and more popular, spurring the start of the aquarium boom. With the experience gained from working on Keikyu Aburatsubo Marine Park, we built up our design portfolio of aquariums, including the former Akita Prefecture Oga Aquarium (1967), the former Oarai Aquarium “Umino Kodomo no Kuni” (1970), Shima Marine Land (1970), and Kushimoto Marine Park (1971).
The 1970s brought revolutionary progress in acrylic panels and ceiling technology. In the Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe, we built a 1,200-ton tank using acrylic panels with a wave machine. This use of large tanks to exhibit creatures in reproductions of their natural habitat pioneered the path to later large-scale aquarium exhibits.
From the 1980s into the ‘90s, a number of aquariums larger than 10,000 m2 were successively built as part of local waterfront development projects. Daiken Sekkei itself designed the Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium (1992), Kagoshima City Aquarium (1997), and others in this period. This period also gave rise to demand for creating aquariums from scratch. Expanding from construction and design, we also offered consulting services covering visitor estimates, budget plans, operating company establishment, exhibit planning, facility planning, and more.
In the 2000s, the first aquariums built in the rapid growth period started showing their age, increasing demand for renovations and expansions. In this sphere, some of our designs include the Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium North Building expansion (2001), Oga Aquarium GAO (2004), renovation of Himeji City Aquarium (2011), renovation of Niigata City Aquarium (2013), the Oga Aquarium GAO seal exhibition expansion (2013), renovation of EPSON Aquapark Shinagawa (2015), and renovation of the Lake Biwa Museum and Aquarium (2016). We also actively integrated new development approaches to aquarium construction, including using private financing to restore the Miyajima Aquarium (2011) and a public-private partnership to design the Sendai Umino-Mori Aquarium (2015).
In more recent years, we have also applied our expertise in designing aquariums to zoo design, working to build advanced facilities for housing both aquatic and terrestrial life. For example, given our experience in designing the polar bear habitat at Oga Aquarium GAO (2004) and creating underwater habitat exhibits, we accepted orders from the Sapporo Maruyama Zoo for a polar bear exhibit (2018) and elephant house (2019). With these projects, we try to create enriched environments which improve the animal’s welfare and health while also dynamically showing animal life, and which are suitable for tending and breeding these rare species.
