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Architects: Yohei Kawashima Architects
- Area: 87 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Koji Fujii / TOREAL
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Lead Architect: Yohei Kawashima
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Structural Engineering: TECTONICA, TECTONICA INC
Text description provided by the architects. This is a plan for a three-story tenant building in Musashino City, Tokyo. The site has a distinctive shape, like a flagpole, which connects both the North and the South side of the building. In this plan, we considered greatly the two roles of this shape. Firstly, as a pathway to make the flow of people circulation and secondly as a carefully designed appearance directing people to fresh experience to walk through.
To fit the slant line regulation in the law of Japan, we adopted a plan to set back the building from the adjacent site by setting the external stairs on the sideway and creating a path below. As a result, the tenants in the building have a simple and equivalent composition on each floor. And this pathway connects the two roads north and south as a path through which people can walk freely through the gaps in the buildings. The site is in a commercial area and the buildings are built up to the edge of the lot. So, it was expected that this pathway would always be dark and oppressive. As a solution, we planned to build a half mirror along the pathway.
The half-mirror fence meticulously picks up the changes in the light and shade of the sunlight that comes through the gaps throughout the day, reflecting the side dimensions of the building and the back side of the adjacent building on the other side. And we would occasionally notice the superimposing of the two views.
Rather than a simple solution of hiding the back of the building by making a flat wall, we created a distinctive pathway where people can feel the flow of the day and the changes in the sunlight by adopting a half-mirror wall plan. Moreover, we expect that the transformation of this rather dark oppressing pathway into an experience of walking in a varied level of sunlight will surely change the quality of the connection between surrounding buildings.
