A Giant Orange Cone Rises Over a Japanese Landfill
Visitors can now climb a giant orange cone that looks out over a landfill on the Japanese island of Shikoku. The structure is an observation deck designed by Ryue Nishizawa, co-founder of the Japanese architecture studio SANAA, and it sits at a recycling complex in the city of Toon, in Ehime prefecture.
The cone is 33 metres across and 4 metres high, according to Dezeen. Its size is meant to copy an artificial hill, so it looks like part of the land rather than a building dropped onto it. Its luminous orange was chosen to stand out against the blue-green lining of the landfill and the surrounding landscape. From the top, the view runs over Oono Development's large landfill basin, the pit where waste is buried and covered.
The cone belongs to Setouchi Art and Industry 2026, the first edition of an art and architecture festival organised by the Japan Industrial Art Foundation. The festival invited artists and architects to work with industrial sites across Okayama and Ehime prefectures. The goal is what the organisers call a decentralised museum, meaning art spread across working sites rather than gathered under one roof.
Seven venues are taking part. Alongside the recycling complex, they include a salt production site, a textile factory, a shipbuilder and a battery manufacturer. Each one is a place where people work every day, not a gallery.
The cone is part of an exhibition called Final Disposal Site, curated by Kazuyo Sejima. A final disposal site is the place where waste is permanently buried. Sejima co-founded SANAA with Nishizawa in 1995. The show also includes bus stops by Shingo Masuda and Katsuhisa Otsubo, and buses and visitor workwear by Suzuko Yamada Architects.
Getting to the work is part of the experience. Visitors must take buses to the site and put on workwear before they go in, so the trip feels more like a shift on the factory floor than a museum visit. The cone also turns the landfill itself into the thing to look at.
The inaugural festival runs until 31 October, so visitors have only a few days left to make the trip.
