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Architects: YSLA Architects
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Munetaka Onodera
Text description provided by the architects. Lighthouse Tokyo is a nine-story building that was designed as a hotel in the neighborhood of Shinjuku, Tokyo, and has been delivered as a residential building due to the impact of COVID-19 on the Tokyo tourism business.
The building is in a crossing along Waseda street. The façade was conceived as a concrete levitating sheet, that erases the boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private, and opens to the street intersection through two round cuts inviting people from every direction. The building was thought of as a lighthouse for travelers. The ground floor, reconverted into a co-working space for the residents is the expression of the new normality.
The building was planned as a series of open floors with a plan developed around the doma space 土間. The doma is in traditional Japanese buildings an area associated with daily use and the entrance points, and it was the center of socialization. In this space, the guests are allowed to enter with shoes, and is the place to gather. The doma is surrounded by a raised floor area that becomes a flexible platform for quiet activities and night use. In this shoeless space, the futons are placed at night depending on the number of guests. The boundary between the doma and the raised floor can be close using light partitions, wooden blinds, or curtains.
The flexibility of the space together with a plan which enhances the Covid-19 guidelines for ventilation, made possible a successful transformation into apartments. Although the building was planned as a hotel we envisioned the importance of the interior-exterior spaces and we design the plan with two balconies per floor. In the new apartment layout one balcony is used for leisure and the other for BOH purposes. These spaces become even more valuable in the middle of the Covid pandemic.
YSLA designed Miwa みわ as modular and flexible furniture that can be assembled and used in different ways and remembers the spirit of the lighthouse in its shape.
