Hasta La Ideas

This tiny gabled pharmacy is squeezed into a narrow alleyway between two towering apartment blocks in Osaka.

Japanese architects Yasuo Imazu of Ninkipen!, Toshikatsu Ienari and Kenta Fukunishi collaborated to design the project, under the collective identity TKY Japan.

Behind the glazed facade, an exposed skeleton of wooden columns and rafters surrounds the building’s long, thin interior.

A wood and steel staircase at the back of the pharmacy leads up to a mezzanine, positioned above an enclosed office.

You can see more projects by Ninkipen! here, including a bakery with an exposed concrete counter.

Photography is by Hiroki Kawata.

Here’s some more explanation from Yasuo Imazu:

This is a new construction of a Pharmacy, in the center of Osaka city area of Japan.

The site once used to be a farm road. When the World War II ended, a small house was built on the road and stayed there illegally for several ten years. After the house was removed, the site then became a residential land.

In front of this newly built pharmacy, there are remains of a sidewalk, which define an original function of the site used to have, thus the building is set back.

That the site was a road, and that there was a small illegally-built house, were the two historical contexts we valuated as the uniqueness of the site.

The form of the building follows the shape of the site with a gabled roof on top which realizes the simplest form of a house. The continuous ceiling which visually creates almost a linear perspective reflects the linear shape of the site, the path or the road.

Though it is surrounded by volumetric urban buildings, we kept the minimum volume of a single story house, recalling a persisting memory of the site, the little house.

The structure is consisted of simple steel-frame which allows the wood columns and rafters to be exposed, thus provides warm and intimate atmosphere to the customers.

Project name: Ogimachi Global Dispensing Pharmacy
Architect: TKY JAPAN（Toshikatsu Ienari, Kenta Fukunishi, Yasuo Imazu/ninkipen!

Use: dispensing pharmacy
Location: Osaka, Japan

Design: 2010.12〜2011.7
Construction: 2011.8〜2011.11

Site area: 96.22m2
Building area: 61.94m2
Total floor area: 61.94m2

Tokyo architects Naoi have completed a three-tiered woodland summerhouse at Japanese holiday spot Nasu Kogen.

Named Tiered Lodge, the split-level house contains a kitchen and dining room on its lower floor, a living room on the middle level and a mezzanine loft and bedroom above.

Large parts of the facade slide open to help cool the house during the warm summer months.

Residents enter the house across a decked balcony and seating area, which leads straight into the lower floor dining room.

Naoi also recently completed a square house with an off-centre courtyard – see it here.

Photography is by Hiroshi Ueda.

Here’s some more text from the architects:

Tiered Lodge

For this project, we were commissioned to build a second home for a husband-and-wife couple and their young son. The client requested a simple space that would allow him to take a step back from the daily demands of his busy schedule and help to rejuvenate his body and mind.

The site is located in Nasu Kogen, a well-known summer resort area in Japan that lies at an altitude of 1,000m. Dense groves of deciduous trees can be found nearby, making the area a popular retreat during the sweltering summer months. In the winter, however, temperatures drop below freezing point, and snowfall of up to 80cm has been recorded.

Elevation varies a total of 8m across the entire site running from east to west. Making use of this sloping gradient, we decided to design a residence that would create a sense of continuity with the forest around it.

The first step was to configure two volumes lying next to each other that corresponded to the contours of the terrain, and then to shift these volumes along both the horizontal and vertical axes. Through this process, we were able to create a level surface that could bridge the gap between the cross-section of the lodge and the forest outside it, while also prompting an awareness of changes in the topography of the site.

The space that emerged as a result of this elevation difference and shifts in the surface of the floor showcases subtle variations in the size of each volume, the windows, and the quality of the light in each interior. This structure enabled us to endow what is essentially a single-roomed space with remarkable depth and variation.

The dining and kitchen area, which opens directly onto the outdoor terrace and features an open stairwell, is situated in the southwest corner of the site, making it a fluid space with a distinctively bright, open quality.

The living room situated on the far eastern end of the site, on the other hand, is configured as a zone of peace and quiet where the family can gather around the fireplace.

The loft, located on a mezzanine that lies above the living room, is a suspended space lying in mid-air that offers the inhabitants a commanding, elevated view of the trees outside the lodge.

The sliding doors at the corner of the dining and living area, which can be stowed inside the wall, give the boundaries between the interior and exterior of the house an ambiguous character. For the façade, special efforts were made to preserve the integrity of the forested landscape by installing exterior walls covered in cedar boards and a continuous series of slit windows.

By paying close attention to the possibilities presented by a given site, and giving spatial form to its distinctive qualities, we hope to be able to continue creating buildings that showcase the beauty that belongs to the realm of architecture.

Japanese studio 403architecture laid the patchwork floor of this bedroom using timber stripped from the ceiling.

The offcuts vary in colour and size, and are arranged at random to create a subtly bumpy surface.

Unlike the other rooms of the Hamamatsu apartment, the bedroom’s floor is not varnished, but simply sanded smooth.

The ceiling above remains unfinished, with ducts and electrical cables left exposed.

This is the second project by 403architecture that we’ve featured recently – see our earlier story about an apartment with drawers in the floor.

Photography is by Kenta Hasegawa.

The text below is from 403architecture:

The Floor of Atsumi

This project is for the floor in Hamamatsu, Japan.

The client who are young couple asked us to repair the bedroom which is in the timeworn apartment house located in the central city area. This plan was advanced while linking the repair of the different rooms performed at the same time.

The ceiling was dismantled to secure enough hight with fanctional converting kitchen into walk-in closet and others. Because we got a enough amount of “scrap wood”, we decide to make a new floor by that was ceilings. We cut various sectional woods finely and spread it all over the floor as a substitute for a tatami mat. Each woods varied in colors across the ages, but all surface is cutting plane. That means this floor is old at the same time new. There are errors of cutting precision and human sole can feel negligible skew of 3D curved surface which was ground smooth by the disc sander. This floor is hard to happen warpage and breaking and it is superior in noise barrier performance.

In this project, we connected destruction and construction directly, by falling the ceiling to the floor.

Every floor of this Tokyo house by Japanese studio Keiji Ashizawa Design opens onto a garden or terrace.

Located in a quiet residential area, the three-storey House S has a dark, windowless street facade with a recessed porch and wooden front door.

Inside, a living and dining area spans the entire ground floor and opens out to a garden flanked by trees.

A winding staircase leads to the two upper storeys, where four bedrooms each have their own dressing rooms.

A grassy mound and pebble garden occupy the first floor balcony, while two separate doors on the second floor lead out to a large wooden deck and garden.

From here, an outdoor staircase ascends to another decked seating area that covers the roof.

Balconies and terraces seem to be a key feature in many of Keiji Ashizawa’s projects – see our previous story about a renovated house with covered balconies and a new roof deck.

Photography is by Daici Ano.

Keiji Ashizawa sent us the following text:

House S

House S is located in a quiet residential area in a center of Tokyo.

The site is of the house is a cul-de-sac, removed from the main thoroughfares, and was once a samurai residence, so their are old pine and zelkova trees in the area.

Such surroundings, even in the midst of the city, significantly impacted the design.

The house includes many gardens on each floor of the house, to bring the surrounding landscape into the house.

In the end, the house will be part of this larger landscape, and in the meantime the green surroundings will help with privacy.

The clients wanted to insure that they could enjoy this larger landscape, as well as the art and furnishings that they have collected.

We extensively discussed both their life style and a setting for these furnishings – and how to mold materials, light, air and space to fit this broader goal.

All materials, lighting and space are in constructed within the house to work with art and furniture, as well as function.

Details and colors are considered for these things. They should be silent, but should have an identity. Most of the design details were developed specifically for this house, with this overall purpose in mind, down to handles, steps and windows.

The structure is complex, but we tried not to make this visible. The space was considered first in terms of the light from the outside, the flow of air, and the planning of art. Enjoyable to see or feel each in the space, and on each level, showing four clear seasons with different light and feelings.

House-S, take client’s name and site name as it was created out of the fusion of the the multitude of things that were important to the site and to the client, rather than for a single, simple theme.

Site: Tokyo
Architect: Keiji Ashizawa Design

Project architect: Keiji Ashizawa / Rie Honjo
Structural engineer: Akira Suzuki

Here are some images by photographer Iwan Baan of a house by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, where rectangular windows puncture three layers of walls and ceilings.

Located in Oita, Japan, House N was constructed in 2008 to accommodate a couple and their pet dog.

Openings in the outer wall and roof aren’t glazed, so the patio garden, bathroom and kitchen contained behind are open to the elements.

A bedroom and tatami room are encased behind the second layer, where all window openings are infilled with glass.

The innermost layer closes in around the centre of the house, wrapping around a living and dining room.

See more projects by Sou Fujimoto here, including a stack of four house-shaped apartments.

Here’s some more text from Sou Fujimoto Architects:

House N
Oita, Japan

A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life inside this gradation of domain.

I have always had doubts about streets and houses being separated by a single wall, and wondered that a gradation of rich domain accompanied by various senses of distance between streets and houses might be a possibility, such as: a place inside the house that is fairly near the street; a place that is a bit far from the street, and a place far off the street, in secure privacy.

That is why life in this house resembles to living among the clouds. A distinct boundary is nowhere to be found, except for a gradual change in the domain. One might say that an ideal architecture is an outdoor space that feels like the indoors and an indoor space that feels like the outdoors. In a nested structure, the inside is invariably the outside, and vice versa. My intention was to make an architecture that is not about space nor about form, but simply about expressing the riches of what are `between` houses and streets.

Three nested shells eventually mean infinite nesting because the whole world is made up of infinite nesting. And here are only three of them that are given barely visible shape. I imagined that the city and the house are no different from one another in the essence, but are just different approaches to a continuum of a single subject, or different expressions of the same thing- an undulation of a primordial space where humans dwell. This is a presentation of an ultimate house in which everything from the origins of the world to a specific house is conceived together under a single method.

Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Sou Fujimoto, principal-in-charge;
Yumiko Nogiri, project team

Consultants: Jun Sato Structural Engineers, structural
Structural system: reinforced concrete

Major materials: reinforced concrete
Site area: 236.57㎡
Built area: 150.57㎡
Total floor area: 85.51㎡
Structural Composition: RC; 1 story
Design Period: 2006 – 2007
Construction Period: will be completed in 2008

Design team: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Consultant: Jun Sato Structural Engineer