Montblanc House by Studio Velocity
Montblanc house recently complted by Japanese architecture firm Studio Velocity, situated in a residential area Japanese, is meant to be poetic and peaceful. With its large windows at ground and first floor, the house opens on the outside, on the resident’s life. While the top floor offers a much more open view of the surrounding mountains. Montblanc house has many facets with different corners: some more intimate, more social and other that opens to the nature.
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Lik House, Tokyo, Japan by Satoru Hirota
Satoru Hirota architects have completed the ‘Lik House’, a single family dwelling within a residential area
of the business district in Tokyo, Japan. Lik House aspires to be a place of comfortable intimacy, says Satoru Hirota.
Three blocks, laid on the plot with angled trajectories, generate an irregular outdoor space that acts as a private square. The courtyard – a place for both physical and visual interaction – projects the interior into the surroundings.
People moving from one room to another feel as if they’re crossing transitional spaces. Dynamic, slender passages are only arrested by intermittent box-like elements in the interior. Despite its remarkably narrow interior, large openings give the house a sense of openness and transparency and introduce a continuous play of light and shadows.
House NA by Sou Fujimoto Architects
Tokyo-based studio Sou Fujimoto Architects has completed the House NA project, a three story family home located in a residential district of Tokyo, Japan.
The clients said they wanted to live like nomads within the house – they didn’t have specific plans for each room. The house looks radical but for the clients it seemed quite natural.”
Designed with a “stack of boxes” in mind, each room of the house offers a small, loosely defined, unique space. These room are each connected by a series of ladders and small stairs and, to get a bit of much needed privacy, can be sectioned off using curtains. Read More…
‘Café Day,’ Japan by Suppose Design Office
For their renovation of this Izakaya (Japanese style bar) based in the quiet residential area of Numazu-shi, Shizuoka Suppose Design Office have taken inspiration from car parks, a driving school and a road. Benches designed to emulate bus stops and car seats transformed in sofas accompany the startlingly unique painted asphalt flooring complete the sensation that a road runs right on through this thoroughly unique space.
Rainbow Millefeuille Bank by Emmanuelle Moureaux architecture
Horizontal layers of colour protrude out from the facade of this bank branch in Tokyo by Tokyo-based french architect Emmanuelle Moureaux.By night each of the twelve colour bands of the Sugamo Shinkin Bank are brightly illuminated. Inside, an ellipsoid-shaped open ceiling allows natural light to spill into the lobby from skylights on the third floor. The light is carried through clear curved glass tubes that pass through the floors and ceilings into the central atrium.
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“Roji,” House, Hokkaido, Japan by Nadamoto Yukiko Architects
Nadamoto Yukiko architects has completed their new project “Roji,” a residence and cafe designed for a couple in their 30s in Hokkaido, Japan. “Roji”, which means alley in Japanese, organizes its internal spaces around a central passageway that runs through the house. To create an authentic atmosphere of an alleyway, the diagonally-running corridor features faceted edges that compress and expand the width of the hallway.
Rooms on the upper level feature small windows that overlook the circulatory spine, offering sight lines to visually connect the living space. simple, decorative arches break up the double-height void while simultaneously serving as an abstract reference to European alleys. Read More…
“Nowhere But Sajima,” House in Japan by Yasutaka Yoshimura
“Nowhere but Sajima House” by Japanese architect Yasutaka Yoshimura is a vacation residence located at 1 hour from Tokyo. Its facade is characterized by eclectic variations of openings and large windows which provide view to Mount Fuji and to the peninsula Enoshima. The side facing towards the ocean is the northern area, and a road with a row of condominiums and heavy traffic run by its side. while the large building aperture enables an open view to the ocean, it also draws all the attention from the road and condominiums.
O House, Kyoto, Japan by Hideyuki Nakayama Architecture
O House created by Hideyuki Nakayama Architecture is located at the beautification zone of the ancient city of Kyoto, and it is built like two lean-to extended out from the 2-story main house.
The center of activities is, if anything, based on those lean-to. Those spaces are simply produced by spanning rafters between the retaining walls of the adjacent house and the main house, end various elements such as kitchen, a dining table, furniture and a bath tub are set around the main house, encircling the main house.
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Beat Pack House, Japan by Studio LOOP
Beat Pack House is based in a dense urban area of Kanagawa, Japan that offers privacy but maintains natural light via a central “plaza”. The concept of nLDK;n (number of private rooms) L (living) D (dining) K (kitchen) is to describe how much value your house has. The spatial flexibility and the relationship between private and public.
Each room is connected by a spiral staircase to the basement buried under study to ensure the four rooms and terraces were requested. Giving the impression that stretch toward the sky from the ground up and down the spiral staircase from the square space is born to do this thing.
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Shell Residence by Kotaro Ide
Shell house designed by Japanese Architect, Kotaro Ide of ARTechnic is located in the Karuizawa forest, Kitasaku, Nagano. The organic shape of the house seems subtle within the forest, and the reinforced cement structure becomes one and harmonizes itself with the landscape.
The design of the residence co-exist with nature.
The principals wanted a residence which will be occupied as a vacation home with frequent visits. The exterior of the “Shell” residence is wrapped in the shell-like concrete structure finished with a penetrative sealer for concretes, which contrasts with the green landscape. Deck wood is used on the patio, while a small amphitheater-like structure has been created in the center of the house around a full-grown tree.
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Nakaikegami House, Japan by Milligram Studio
Designed by Japanese http://www.milligram.ne.jp, the house in Naka-Ikegami is full of surprises; from clever floor storage to an ingenious pullout kitchen counter, which rolls out from the wall into the center of a small kitchen, providing an island for extra cooking space.
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Proposal for the Fashion Museum Omotesando, Japan by Donald Shek
Here is the proposal for the fashion museum Omotesando Competition by Donald Shek.
The challenge consists in designing a 100 meters high tower-museum, containing exhibition areas of 20th century fashion history and becoming a landmark for Tokyo. For this purpose, the site is located at Omotesando Street, since this avenue gathers the world’s most important fashion houses, at their maximum magnificence. These buildings have been designed by Japan and the world’s best architects. It is an incredible opportunity for the winning architect to gain professional acknowledgement at a potential growing market, such as fashion houses buildings in Tokyo.
The stacks of layers that create the façade scale up the entire building creating a semi transparent skin; this skin allows both the outside to view the internal exhibitions as well as allowing the internal events to animate the public realm. The skin at the lower levels around the street edge form canopies for passers-by and visitors; as well as forming habitable spaces for the public to appropriate. the core is formed around the centre of the site allowing
full penetration of light through the skin into the building.
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House in Higashi-Matsubara by Ken’ichi Otani Architects
This renovation realized by Ken’ichi Otani Architectsand is an expansion project of an eighteen-year-old house for two families. Only the part for the young family was renovated with an addition. The house is located in a reasonably good residential area of suburban Tokyo. The site has a good garden with abundant trees on the south side. A tall orange tree provides a nice shade over the west side road.
For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
At about $620 a month, rent’s not that cheap, though that does afford you a small in-capsule TV and fresh linens, as well as access to communal areas. The capsules have screens instead of doors, and their thin walls provide little privacy. There is, of course, little space for personal possessions, so most residents keep their things stowed in even smaller lockers on the premises.
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Maison Hermès Window Display by Tokujin Yoshioka
The Maison Hermès window display in Tokyo has been restructured by the Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka. The Maison Hermes Tokyo store front uses timed videos of a woman blowing and hidden fans to highlight one of Hermes’s most iconic accessories, their silk scarves.
The installation will run from now until January 19th, 2010.
Celluloid Jam House in Yokohama, Japan by Norisada Maeda
Entitled Celluloid Jam, this house created by Norisada Maeda features walls that aim to flow continuously around the exterior, from inside to outside and back again like a Moebius strip.
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House H, Tokyo by Sou Fujimoto Architects
House H is the latest project by Sou Fujimoto Architects in Tokyo.
Fujimoto seized the opportunity to extend his research into the potential of primitive forms to create complex responses to contemporary needs. It’s new experiment was to find a balance between volumes, spaces and light.
Dealing innovatively with Japan’s strict plot ratio regulations, Fujimoto has avoided the conventions of creating a courtyard or of setting a house as an isolated object within the site boundary. Instead it is a hybrid; a series of boxes in boxes that define domestic realm, enclosure and interior.
I ♥ Yu, Naoshima Bathhouse by Shinro Ohtake
The Naoshima Bath house was opened on July 26, 2009 under the name of “I♥湯 (I love you).” Conceived by the artist Shinro Ohtake, this charming name softens the hearts of the customers before using the bathroom.
The project is particularly interesting because it blurs the distinction between art and practical daily life (the bathhouse can be used by locals, who pay just 300 yen rather than the standard 500 yen entrance fee to use it), between private corporations and public works, and between inside and outside.
The bottoms of the baths are lined with stones and collages of found images and shunga erotic prints that come in and out of view with the movement of the water.
