Located in a central Tokyo neighborhood with many low and mid-rise office buildings, this rental building for restaurants stands on a long, narrow lot, surrounded on three sides by streets.
Key considerations when designing a building of this type are how to create a group identity for the tenants and how to relate the units to the cityscape.
Because of its city-center location, this mid-rise building needed to be commercially efficient, occupying the entire permissible floor area ratio and filling that space with restaurant tenants on every floor.
The project took place in Kichijoji (one of Tokyo’s suburban towns)’s Harmonica Yokochi, a wondrous bystreet that still retains the atmosphere of black-market stalls during the post-World War II period. We designed the interior for a small Yakitori bar that sits on the edge of the street.
This is a small house in a residential area in Bunkyo-ku Tokyo. We set large windows on the open south side and set a green screen as south facade by making planter boxes on each floor. The ceiling at the window is mirror finished, it functions as a device that green captures inside the room. The eaves were deeply attached to each floor, the void was divided by the planters. Keeping an appropriate distance with neighbors, we just imagined a meditation space that can live together with GREEN plants in small streets. We thought here is not ‘modest living’ of ‘small dwell’ but a ‘BIG LIFE’ of ‘SMALL DWELL’.
Located on a lot with a narrow frontage, this building houses a gallery on the first floor and a residence on the second and third floors. The client requested that the gallery have a glass facade to allow good visibility from the street and be a single open space to ensure flexibility and allow for future changes in use. They also requested a separate entrance to the second-floor residential area, and a design that required no structural walls on the first floor, such as a Rahmen structure.
It is a shared office for creators co-organized by Japanese design office id inc. and photo and video company bird and insect Ltd. It is consist of office, library, workroom, conference room, and photo studio. As a place to create various works, space like a blank sheet without a strong concept was created. Walls that stand like drawing extension lines to the old building before its renovation partition space. The architectural structure has several openings that look continuous makes visitors feel more depth. It is a place to demonstrate how a new office for creators should be structured. The beauty of this office is that a total proposal from product planning, production, to final display can be consistently made. The pure white space has a gallery-like atmosphere so that it also functions as a place for exhibition at any time.
This project is on display at the Center-gai, located at the intersection of Inokashira-street and the Yumeji-street. The surroundings bristle with commercial buildings holding signboards. Our proposal is to visualize every floor as a volume in which through its full glazing façade, pedestrians can per-ceive the inner-life from the street. In this way, they recognize the building not from the signage but from the volume of the building. We produce diversity from maximizing the rental spaces through commanding the sky factor. External shaft equipment allows 100% rentable floor area ratio to pre-serve economic efficiency, and we developed a sash less, insulated glazing, fire preventing, steel curtain wall on the surface to mimic the appearance of glass in each floor as layers.
Yoga is about the inner strength of one self, it is about the mentality, as well as the physical, it is about the ability to go beyond who we are, and push the limits of possibility.
Article source: APOLLO Architects & Associates Co., Ltd
This home is located in the old town area of eastern Tokyo, where the atmosphere of an industrial district still lingers. The client, who works at a large advertising agency, and his wife purchased the building site in an area where they had lived in for some years. Their primary request with regard to the design was that the house have a courtyard.
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