It is a husband’s popular Chinese restaurant, his wife’s hair salon, and also their home in Yoshikawa, Japan. Minami Yoshikawa’s House is a 2016 project about a mixed-use architecture in a two-storey building designed by WIPE. With 202 m² in size, this building offers connected and centered spaces supported by a wooden structure.
Located in a dense urban area in Tokyo, this apartment complex is a 2018 project designed by wipe. Skyterrace Apartment is a modern apartment that needs a good architecture to give strong privacy for its residents. The closed exterior and the open interior are designed to enhance the communication between the residences.
This private house is designed by Nendo from Japan, located in Japan’s Chichibu region where the residents look forward to the festival of annual December fireworks. Completed in 2015, Fireworks House is built for the client who wants her elderly mother to be able to watch the fireworks from the festival. Part of the roof is replaced with glass panels so it is very easy to see the fireworks from upstairs.
Located in a quiet residential area of Tokyo, Stairway House sits on a site with other apartment buildings and houses pressing around. This two-family home is designed by Nendo with an architectural volume that pushes to the north and a layout plan to preserve the existing persimmon tree. The “stairway-like” structure connects the house interior to the yard and also bonds one household to another, supported by some functional elements of the house.
The interiors of the building are soft and natural with white surfaces and the use of wood materials for some parts of the building, including the beams on the ceiling and floor design. From the outside, this building looks like a concrete square with a flat roof. Being in a narrow alley doesn’t mean it is impossible to design a new building with a wider space in it.
While imagining the children’s activities at the floor level of the building, the design is also adjusted so the interference between the wall and the ceiling is achieved and the exact result of the design can be shown. A diverse and free space is also created that can’t be understood from the design plan alone.
The site of the building is an undulating and greenery area of Tokyo Yamanote, so the architect tries to attract more great views of surroundings such as green spaces on the premises of the neighbor and cherry blossom trees on the front road. The dwelling type is also combined complicatedly just like 3D puzzles that can create a unique look for everyone who sees it.
The space under the stairs can be transformed into a rental store, the corridor on the second floor becomes a workspace, and the stairs on the third floor can be used with house furniture integrally. By combining the use of space and stairs, there is another use inside the house while having the original uses of each other.
Made of steel and glass, the staircase acts as an expansion joint between the two concrete volumes. The front volume of the building is counterweighed by a matt slab of 1.2 meters due to the seismic risk in Japan and its tall-thin proportion. The architect adds a roof terrace enclosed by a perimeter wall of 2.4m to increase the slenderness. This addition can result in a very unusual proportion of 1:7.7.
This project is a cooperative project, so the production of human relations and the production of architecture simultaneously advance. It is very effective too to include a workshop in the process design that can polish up the “texture of city”. In the future, the architect wishes that this building will be “the historic property of the area”.
If you have a good time to come to Japan, you need to see this awesome Cafe. Blue Bottle Coffee Sangenjaya Cafe is a coffee cafe which is located in Sangenjaya, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan. It is built by the Schemata Architects and Jo Nagasaka is the man in charge of this cafe. The Blue Bottle Coffee Sangenjaya Cafe is a project in 2017 with 100 meters square of large. At first, this cafe was a 50 years old building with a low-rise type near the Sangenjaya Station.
Alana Groom
Bella Duckworth
Ella Summers
Karin Hoover
Linjo Joson
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