Yoji Watanabe was born 1923, in Joetsu. The son of a long line of carpenters, Watanabe defied his father and enrolled at the Takada College of Technology, where he studied until 1941. Which was followed by working at the Nihon Steel Group until 1947, he was then hired by the architectural firm Kume and partners. To 1959 he studied for a second time at the Waseda University in Tokyo.

Watanabe then opened his own architectural studio. He attacked the ideas of metabolism, and laid great emphasis on density, prefabrication of individual elements and the ability to expand its arbitrary designs. So he produced designs such as 'Habitat 70', a response to the suburban area located in the 'Habitat 67' by Moshe Safdie, which he condenses in an urban context.

Watanabe's most famous building is the 'New Sky Building No.3' (1972, Tokyo), which is built with a high proportion of steel. The Battleship looking building is a residential and office office in the Shinjuku district, it also has a high proportion of prefabricated elements, reminiscent of the capsule architecture of Kisho Kurokawa.