© Takumi Ota
- Architects: Ryuichi Sasaki / Sasaki Architecture , Rieko Okumura/Atelier O
- Location: 6 Chome-23-16 Togoshi, Shinagawa-ku, Tōkyō-to 142-0041, Japan
- Design Team: Ryuichi Sasaki, Rieko Okumura, Gen Sakaguchi, Michal Rogozinski
- Producer: Modelia CO.,LTD
- Area: 331.19 sqm
- Project Year: 2016
- Photographs: Takumi Ota , Bauhaus Neo
- Light Design: Natsuha Kameoka / Lighting Sou
- Contractor: MAGOME CONSTRUCTION Company
- Building Management: ALPHA MANAGEMENT & PARTNERS CO.,LTD.
- Client: SHUKO KENSETSU Co.,LTD
© Bauhaus Neo
The building sits in a neighbourhood shopping lane in Nakanobu, just south to the central district of Tokyo. The town is a mixture of old and new. A grandma’s confectionary and a jazz festival, pensioners among young couples, all share the same streets happily together. The site locates itself in the vicinity of a newsstand, a bathhouse and alike. In order to fit in to this yet humble liveliness of the town, the building’s scale is restrained to those of the neighbouring buildings, 4 stories with only 12 units.
Plan / Elevation
The skewed arrangement of the openings on the façade, concentrated at the bottom and spread gradually up, is to give a floating feel and to reduce massive weightiness of the concrete. A pathway secures an appropriate distance from merely 6m-wide busy lane on the front, giving privacy to the secluded entrance.
© Bauhaus Neo
Interior is composed solely of exposed concrete and plain white walls in simplest possible details. Planning as well as design aims thorough simplicity: a set of modest independent walls replaces a closet; one tap serves cooking and handwashing. These propose minimal form of a collective dwelling, life unreliant on products, richness of not having. Minimalism here is in direct connection with the way of living.
© Takumi Ota
The few elements left, on the other hand, are designed to stimulate new ideas for habitation. The storage walls, without limitation in usage, can be a perfect fit for a cosy den. The large concrete kitchen counter, a desk. Simplicity when resolute, gives out a new flexibility.
Every single opening is square-shaped. Square is the purest, most primitive form of an opening when thinking outside modernist-style conventions such as verticality or horizontality. Every space inside and outside is rhythmically connected to each other through or across these square, pure openings.
© Takumi Ota
Windows in particular are planned to mediate or control interpenetration between <inside – simple, minimal> and <outside – lively bustle>. A colourful vigour of the shopping lane, trimmed with square openings and arranged on the interior wall, turns into a muffled, controlled scene. Shaped view of the city becomes the only ornamental element inside.
Galvanized steel window frames cast varying shadows to add a non-uniform expression on the facade, emerging as distinctive icons in the cityscape. These reflect outside activity back into the room, again adding variety to the view to the city.
© Takumi Ota
Sig Nordal 