We designed a new office space for a creative agency in Tokyo applying mixture of technology and traditional Japanese wood works for structure, furniture and fixtures. To keep the flexibility of the space, we suggested a portable partition system to insert on the floor and create proper size of the area.
The floor includes lab space intended for long-term project and war room intended for many projects to have short, intensive period of discussions. Each space is divided by glass partitions so that each active project can feel each other and is visible at a glance.
Ginza Place, a major commercial development in Tokyo’s famous Ginza shopping district, occupies arguably the most prominent recent development site in Japan. Ginza’s reputation for elegance and sophistication has made it a center of Japanese culture and commerce for more than a century. Ginza Place completes the neighborhood’s central intersection by introducing a bold and well calculated facade to the streetscape.
We renovated our apartment building in Shibuya, Tokyo for vacation rental services such as AirBnB.
We designed this space so that it will be a clean, quiet place for rest, opposite from the feeling of the city its located in and for tourists who will be enjoying all the excitement of Shibuya, one of the most cutting-edge downtown areas in Asia.
On a plot in Tokyo, a small garden has been thriving next to an old house for a long time. As the tiny existing building was replaced, our client really wanted to preserve the garden and allow it to sprawl all around the house. The small plot should also fit a parking, the maximum footprint of the house, and the necessary gap to the site perimeter. The client is a couple that will first use this house as a weekend house before eventually moving to Tokyo. They also have grown-up children living in Tokyo and abroad that will inhabit the house from time to time. Therefore, the program was fairly unspecified, and rather than making a house with many small rooms, we opted for a concept which gives a few large spaces in this small house.
The site is located in a residential district, which is easily accessible from a principal road. It is a so-called “flagpole-shaped site”, meaning that the rectangular site is located at some distance from the public road and linked to it by a long and narrow path. The site is surrounded by two-story and three- story buildings on the four sides. The client requested an indoor garage so that he can enjoy looking at his beloved car from living room and also an inclined roof with solar panels.
“coniwa” is a cooperative housing residence, located in the suburbs of western Tokyo.
It consists of eleven dwellings arranged around a lush courtyard, which is covered by a wooden boardwalk. In this project the clients were initially provided with a constructive and architectural framework, in which the plan was designed according to the individuals’ requests.
The site is there in a residential area in Tokyo, dense with low-rise buildings, located a little bit west to the center of the Kanto plain. The climate there is about to change from warm humid climate to rainforest climate in near future.
I’m not making a “house” this time. It should be a lasting “terrain” that induces “habitation”. My goal is to shape the terrain up to a freshly designed “residence” with no preestablished harmony sensed.
“dialogue” between the old and the new “substance” This is a house to be built in Tokyo, for a movie producer couple. This architecture is consisted by combining L-shaped blocks of reinforced concrete and sequential frames of box-shaped engineer-wood. We put bedrooms, film archive and galley in solid concrete part for security, and living room in engineer-wood part for openness. As material that consist an open space that is 6m in height, 5.5m in width, 14m in depth, we choose thin engineer-wood (38mmx287mm). Main theme for this architecture is to bring out a sense of mass and material, which were denied by modern architecture which pursued “white, flat wall” as a style. We intentionally left the wood grain of mold on the surface of concrete, and choose textured stones and irons. It goes without saying that a house is a relaxing place. A house like a white-cube, surrounded by flat, white walls everywhere, gives a person very abstract image. But that image could only be sensed when we use intellective part of our brain. The problem is that we’re not all-intellective-creature. For the people like this client, who do enough intellectual labor on a daily basis, white-cube would only bring sense of fatigue. The role of architecture, especially the ones for living, is to soothe the sensory side of people, not to stimulate the intellectual side. That’s my take. Sure, intellectual living would have got some meaning as a fashion at the time when modern architecture was born. However, now that it became a part of everyday life, its identity has been lost. We have to examine whether our approach is rational or not every time we build architecture.
Article source: Jun Mitsui & Associates Inc. Architects
Ginza is renowned around the world as a commercial hotspot in Tokyo. Marronnier street in Ginza is an especially bright street lined with great buildings each with their own individuality and architectural design. We felt that the De Beers Ginza Building should express the brightness and the glow of Ginza at the same time. For the design, what we imagined firstly was an image of gently curving streams of light. Like a light ribbon being held above the ground, or the aurora that changes its colour and shape continuously, we thought it should have a bright and graceful form with curved lines that look like a women’s beautiful silhouette. We decided to brighten the stainless steel to appear like a diamond glitter along the silhouette to give it a sensitive look. The building has been constructed with stainless steel being rolled out in a curved shape. Each stainless steel surface has a special finish, so the appearance reflects the light of the sky and the town sensitively and changes its appearance throughout the day with the movement of the sun. At the same time, the architectural expression shows infinite changes depending on the position it is seen from. Ginza has always been on the frontier of design, adopting changes over time to form the town. De Beers Ginza is a part of that tradition and our design is an expression of this ever changing town on the frontier of architectural design.
House with 30,000 Books is a residence for two families, which has a large library between those two dwelling parts. As the name suggests, the number of books the library can store is about 30,000, which almost equals to the number of books that one small public library can store. The library space, sometimes works for bonding two families, sometimes works as a buffer space, is the common property for them and the most spacious place of this house.
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