ASSISTANT GENERAL MANAGER HOTEL JOB DESCRIPTION

Imperial Hotel Tokyo from a 35mm slide taken sometime in the 50's or 60's.

The second Imperial Hotel, built from 1915-1923, would be the best-known of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings in Japan. It was designed roughly in the shape of its own logo, with the guest room wings forming the letter "H", while the public rooms were in a smaller but taller central wing shaped like the letter "I" that cut through the middle of the "H".

Architecture
The Frank Lloyd Wright version was designed in the "Maya Revival Style" of architecture. It incorporates a tall, pyramid-like structure, and also loosely copies Maya motifs in its decorations. The main building materials are poured concrete, concrete block, and carved oya stone. The visual effect of the hotel was stunning and dramatic, though not unique; in recent years, architectural historians have noted a marked similarity with the Cafe Australia, Melbourne, Australia (1916) designed by Prairie School architects Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin.

The hotel had several design features that made up for its foundation:

The reflecting pool (visible in the picture above) provided a source of water for fire-fighting, saving the building from the post-earthquake firestorm;
Cantilevered floors and balconies provided extra support for the floors;
A copper roof, which cannot fall on people below the way a tile roof can;
Seismic separation joints, located about every 20 m along the building;
Tapered walls, thicker on lower floors, increasing their strength;
Suspended piping and wiring, instead of being encased in concrete, as well as smooth curves, making them more resistant to fracture.
The architecture heavily influenced the style of the Koshien Hotel, which was constructed by Wright's apprentice Arata Endo.

1923 Great Tokyo Earthquake
The structure famously survived the magnitude 8.3 Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. A telegram from Baron Kihachiro Okura reported the following:

Hotel stands undamaged as monument to your genius Congratulations

Wright's passing the telegram to journalists has helped perpetuate a legend that the hotel was unaffected by the earthquake. In reality, the building had damage; the central section slumped, several floors bulged,[1] and four pieces of stonework fell to the ground.[2] The building's main failing was its foundation. Wright had intended the hotel to float on the site's alluvial mud "as a battleship floats on water."[1] This was accomplished by making it shallow, with broad footings. This was supposed to allow the building to float during an earthquake. However, the foundation was an inadequate support and did nothing to prevent the building from sinking into the mud to such an extent that it had to be demolished decades later.[1] Furthermore, alluvial mud, such as that at the hotel's site, amplifies seismic waves.

The hotel survived an earlier earthquake that struck Tokyo during its construction. While many buildings in the area were destroyed, the hotel itself — while shaken — stood completely undamaged.

Post-War
The hotel came through World War II unscathed, despite the devastating bombings of Tokyo by the Americans. It was commandeered for a period by the Occupation forces and managed by the US Government, before being returned to its owners. As the guest wings of the Wright building were only three stories tall, it actually had relatively few guest rooms, and so a new tower wing was constructed directly behind Wright's building in the 1950s.

The hotel eventually slipped into decay as time took its toll. In a controversial decision, it was decided to demolish the old hotel and replace it with a high-rise structure, to maximize the use of land.

Imperial hotel, formerly National Surgical Institute (demolished) formerly at the NW corner of the intersection of Capital st. and Ohio St., Indianapolis, Ind.

In Jan 1892 the old home of the National Surgical Institute burned and 19 patients were killed, this building was built following that disaster as the new home of the hospital. The Institute soon went bankrupt and by 1898 the building housed the Medical College of Indiana. By 1901 this institution has also vacated the building and the current tenant was the Imperial Hotel.
unknown demolition date.

Site is currently a parking lot

from the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Collection