This six-apartment building is placed in Tokyo. The design is the result of a competition.
The building is strongly additive: It begins from the inside with a strict, minimalist formal response to the site, executed in a rich material palette. (Each apartment has a distinct personality, informing the materiality for its very different spaces.) The structure expands outward as needed to accommodate spatial requirements and to ‘grow’ around the existing trees on the site. Considering environmental sensitivity as a design parameter, this response is a sort of contemporary form-follows-function.
Views out are sharply, yet tightly framed as some spaces sacrifice an outward view and are forced to look upward. This move enriches the scheme accentuating its angular treehouse-like forms.
In contrast to the formally unique, themed units (which are sort of fit neatly together as a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle), the building is skinned with a crisp, warm wood surface, unifying the whole.
The project’s sensitive approach is poetically threaded across the exterior with built-in birdhouses which promise not to displace any previous tenants of the site from the construction. These tertiary dwellings manifest through the same formal language that gives the building its mystical presence.
Images courtesy of: Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP Architects
