This rice shop is located on a modest-sized shopping street spanning 300 meters between the main shopping area and Togoshi Koen station.
The street used to prosper with an array of small individual shops, but it has declined substantially and many shops had been closed down. As a consequence, the street is increasingly filled with closed shutters. If no measure is taken against the declining condition, it would eventually become a so-called “shutter street” and the shopping street would disappear.
A local team, Owan Ltd., is striving to reactivate the shopping street. They operate MR. COFFEE, a roastery/coffee shop, and PEDERA BRANKA, a café, on the same street.
Article source: APOLLO Architects & Associates Co., Ltd
This small house in a residential district in eastern Tokyo is home to a couple and their young children. The dark grey galvalume cladding blends gently into the surrounding environment, as if it has been there for many years. Because the lot sits across the street from an elementary school, the clients requested a design that ensured privacy yet was as open as possible.
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Panasonic Corporation, 100 BANCH was established as an innovative work platform where Panasonic works in collaboration with future generations to create new values that will help shaping the next 100 years. The first floor is a cafe space “KITCHEN” organized and run by Cafe Company; the second floor is a work space “GARAGE” for project members who are concurrently developing multiple projects; the third floor is a collaborative space “LOFT” for creation of new values for the next 100 years. Schemata Architects was responsible for the overall exterior design and interior design of the second and third floors. “GARAGE” on the second floor has a very low ceiling height of 2015 mm, but we decided to make the best use of the low, hand-reachable ceiling to bring out the unique potential of the space that would be used as the creative platform intended to imagine the next 100 years. We designed a ceiling-mounted lighting and power supply socket using the “duplex lamp socket”, which is an iconic product invented by Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (the former company name of Panasonic), and installed the sockets at 750-mm intervals on the ceiling; they can be directly and easily attached/detached by hand so that users can arrange the work space flexibly on their own and use light and power at any location. In order to extend such freedom of movement vertically as well as horizontally, automatic height adjustable tables are adopted, allowing people to stand and sit freely and consequently creating a highly flexible expandable work place where they can work or hold meetings anywhere.
LIFE SPACE UX is a SONY’s new brand born with a concept to fit in daily life. I designed a space to showcase its series of products.
I picked the idea of “Shichu no sankyo” in Japanese tea ceremony terms as a theme of this project, this is the idea of a country cottage built in the middle of a modern metropolis and also suggests another dimension therefore I built a modern Japanese space in the center of Ginza, Tokyo.
Délirium Café opened at Ginza Tokyo, off the main street where many attractive small restaurants stand side by side along the off-street. It has a narrow entrance with the width of 3 meters. Whereas it is a unique shaped café with the depth of 30 meters long. To make an effective use of this shape, we divided the area into three sections. Every section has their original characteristics.
In 2013 Andrea Tognon Architecture has been commissioned by Max Mara fashion group to design a new building for Japanese Max&Co headquarter in Omotesando Tokyo. The result is a 30 meter tower built around a central cipollino marble column which supports the entire building. Five thick curved concrete slab divide the building in six floors. All the services disappear in a dark background that host a golden staircase claiming the building till a pergola that overview the entire city.
Article source: tomomi kito architect & associates
This is an interior renovation project of an existing two-story timber structure house in Tokyo built approximately 40 years ago.
The client is a young couple, and the wife’s parents were living there before the renovation. The client decided to live with their parents in this house. Soon after, the wife’s grandmother who lives alone in the countryside – far from Tokyo – also decided to live together in this house. As such, the client requested to renovate the house suitable for accommodating 4 generations – the grandmother (1st generation), parents (2nd generation), the client (3rd generation), the client’s son (4th generation).
Naito Shinjuku was established in 1699 as a stage stop along a major thoroughfare heading out of Edo (old name of Tokyo). Dropping the “Naito,” the district started to be called Shinjuku in 1920, the same year that saw the Musashino-kan Shinjuku emerge on Shinjuku-dori Avenue, which was also home to the Shinjuku Mitsukoshi store. Local merchants opened a 600-seat movie theater in the three-story wooden structure with tiled façades. In 1928, Musashino-kan Shinjuku relocated to its current site, a new cinema with 1,115 seats housed in a three-story concrete building. During the silent movie era, Musei Tokugawa was active as a narrator here. Later, an air raid over Tokyo caused a fire to burn the entire interior of the theater, but the building survived and became a symbol of post-war recovery. Cinema offered entertainment to the populace, and Musashino-kan entered the golden age in an alliance of more than 20 theaters. But the movie-going population peaked in 1958 at 1.1 billion tickets, and rapidly dropped to 1/3 of that patronage by 1965. Amidst a declining industry, the decrepit Musashino-kan was demolished in 1966 and rebuilt. Still standing today, the building initially consisted of a retail and dining complex seven floors aboveground and three floors underground. The first movie theater in this new building had 500 seats on the seventh floor. In 1994, the Cinema Qualite mini-theater opened. The seventh floor was closed in 2002, and the third-floor theater operations changed banners from Cinema Qualite to Musashino-kan Shinjuku. For the improvements made most recently, however, aseismic reinforcement work on the entire building prompted the Musashino-kan Shinjuku on the third floor to undergo a complete renovation.
Article source: Satoshi Kurosaki / APOLLO Architects & Associates
After inheriting the house that his father had built, the client originally considered tearing it down and rebuilding. However, the thirty-some-year-old building had an authentic beauty to it, and its reinforced concrete structure was sound, so he decided to work with the existing framework. The renovation focused on interiors and appliances, while the exterior was left nearly untouched aside from the approach, windows, and doors.
What does an authentic workplace look like? Designing an authentic office is not an easy task. Just like the terms “artist”, “poet” or “great lover”, these are titles that are given or need to be earned rather than being self-assigned.
Our attempt in creating an authentic workplace started off with our WorkVitamins methodology. This methodology was created by me, Martin van der Linden, principal of van der Architects, when I was an assistant researcher at Waseda Univeristy in 2001 here in Tokyo. I believes that architecture can be a catalyst for change in innovative environments, and this methodology – called “WorkVitamins” – is based on this idea.
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