Hasta La Ideas

More concrete from Tokyo: the headquarters of clothing company Neighborhood has a bare concrete and steel interior that reflects the heavy-duty aesthetic of the brand.

Designed by Japanese architects General Design, the warehouse-like building contains staff offices on its ground, mezzanine and first floors, and presentation areas and a car park occupy the two basement levels.

A double-height workspace is central to the design and is naturally lit from above by a row of clerestory windows.

Cement panels line the walls in this room, while plywood partitions separate spaces in the lower basement.

“We hope that this building will eventually be nicely worn out ” explain the architects, “like a piece of good vintage clothing that you’ve cherished for a long time.”

The building are located in the Shibuya district, close to the two main branches of the store.

We’ve featured a couple of other concrete buildings by General Design on Dezeen, including a shop with no windows.

See all our stories about concrete »

Photography is by Daici Ano.

There’s more text below from General Design:

NH Office Building
Shibuya, Tokyo

This is a head office building of a Tokyo-based apparel brand “Neighborhood” which offers basic clothing influenced by various subcultures associated with motorcycles, military, outdoor etc., located in Shibuya district in Tokyo.

The building consists of workspaces on the first and the second floors, garage and presentation room on the basement floors.

Since the company has a relatively small number of employees, it was not top priority to maximize office space.

Instead of typical office building plan, using entire floor area for office space with vertical circulation located in the back, we decided to allow more space for interconnectivity between workspaces on all floors, to enhance creative and productive work environment.

Long skylight is provided along the central axis, creating a sort of long and thin light well along the central axis.

All workspaces are located at different levels on both sides of the light well, and they are connected with gently inclined stairs running along the central axis.

The light well helps them to keep comfortable distance between all workspaces, while creating a sense of togetherness at the same time.

We intended to create rather bare and unembellished space like a warehouse. Finish materials are rough exposed concrete, fiber reinforced cement board, black painted steel and larch plywood.

We selected ordinary and rough materials used in industrial environment, in order to minimize the sense of “newness” and emphasized strong presence of each element.

We hope that this building will eventually be nicely worn out and be even more attractive as time goes by, like a piece of good vintage clothing that you’ve cherished for a long time. Our ambition is to propose future vintage architecture.

NH office building.
Architect: Shin Ohori / General Design

Location: shibuya Tokyo
Structural system: reinforced concrete

Site area: 402.17m2
Built area: 236.98m2
Total floor area: 992.31m2

The post NH Office Building
by General Design appeared first on Dezeen.

Chunky chipboard surfaces have been sanded and stained to look like marble at this Aesop skincare shop in Tokyo by Japanese studio Torafu Architects (+ slideshow).

A muted brown stain coats the wooden walls and countertops and bottles sit within recessed shelves and openings.

Two island counters accomodate hidden drawers and cupboards, sinks and a cash register.

Other Aesop stores we’ve published include a shop filled with translucent boxes on stilts and a kiosk made from newspapers.

See all our stories about Aesop »

See all our stories about Torafu Architects »

Photography is by Takumi Ota.

Here’s some more information from Torafu Architects:

Aesop Shin-Marunouchi – Torafu Architects

For Aesop, an Australian skincare brand celebrating its 25th year anniversary this year, we proposed an interior fit-out located in the Shin-Marunouchi Building. Concurrent to this, we also designed Aesop Yokohama Bay Quarter, which opened at the same time.

Aesop’s skincare products emphasise on maintenance to restore the skin’s natural health, and in a similar way we had chosen a key material that reflects this idea for the two stores. OSB (Oriented Strand Board) is a wood which has characteristic textures and patterns, and of which are accentuated are accentuated once sanded and stained in different ways. While associated as a rough material typically used in construction, as it is stained the wood adopts a stone-like appearance. The result is a distinct materiality which be felt throughout the store space.

At Aesop Shin-Marunouchi, the OSB has been stained with a brown colour to distinguish the store with its neighbours within the bright surrounding environment. The central band of display seen stretched across the back wall binds the store space to a single point of focus, naturally drawing customers towards the products.

In the foreground of the shops are stand-alone functional counters that allow the corner shop space to be freely circulated. Small stores require an efficient use of space, so the activities essential to the shop’s operation have been carefully considered and housed into the ‘floating’ boxes to assist in operational processes. We thought about how the volumes of these counters can be opened at various parts when required, and eventually closed back into a simple box.

Even located within a large commercial building, we have focused on how we can clearly reflect Aesop’s brand image into these stores.

Principle use: shop
Production: Ishimaru
Credit: Graphic design: Aesop
Building site: Shin-Marunouchi Building, Marunouchi, Tokyo Total floor area: 22.53m2
Design period: 2012.02-2012.06
Construction period: 2012.06

The post Aesop Shin-Marunouchi
by Torafu Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

All the rooms of this renovated Tokyo house by Japanese studio Naf Architect & Design are connected to a wooden box at its centre.

The architects liken this connecting room to an electrical switch box.

It contains staircases leading up and down, an entrance from the house into the client’s chiropractic surgery and a small seating area.

Narrow grooves between each of the wooden slats let light filter inside and provide space for hanging picture hooks.

The living and dining room is located on the first floor just above, where the the roof of the box forms the surface of a kitchen worktop.

See more stories about Japanese houses on Dezeen here.

Photography is by Toshiyuki Yano.

Here’s some more information from Naf Architect & Design:

Switch Box in House

This is a total interior renovation project of an existing house, installing a box made of deck lumber in the middle of the house.

The existing house is 17 year-old, two-story, 4-bedroom wooden structure on top of semi-underground garage. It could serve as home, but we could not see how and for whom the room layout was made.

New owner of the house is a family of three; a couple with a child. Installed in the center of the house is a hall-like space made by a large box which gives a doorway to chiropractic clinic run by the wife, to the bedroom of the couple, to the entrance of the house, to living and dining room upstairs, and to karaoke room in basement. As rooms of various purposes were relocated in the existing house, the composition of the house became more like that of a complex facility. The box-like space which brings together traffic lines and connects each room is, in a sense, switch box of traffic lines.

The box is made of deck lumber, whose top side has large interspace between lumber and let sunlight pour downstairs. On the sides of the box are smaller interspaces to avoid the gaze but large enough to let through the voices. It allows loose spatial continuity from the second floor to the basement and at the same time, interspaces are adjusted to keep privacy when there are guests. In the living-dining room on the second floor, the top of the box comes up to the height of a counter suitable for housework. High side windows on the sloped ceiling take in ample sunshine and the top of the box can be used as sunroom. Hooks can be placed between the deck lumber to hang pictures, hangers or foliage plants anywhere we like. There is almost no exterior space for garden within the premises, and it was our challenge to introduce various living scenes indoors by using the box.

The existing house before the renovation was one of many typical houses in the real estate market. In this renovation, we made Karaoke room in the basement, taking advantage of the sound insulation properties of concrete foundation. We see possibilities in creating new living environment by taking advantage of such properties.

Name of the Project: Switch Box in House
Location: Suginami ward, Tokyo
Category: detached house
Structure: Wood construction
Maximum height: 8.859m
Frontal road: 5.54m on the west
Site area: 71.51m2
Total floor area: 127.99m2
Completion: Desember 25, 2012
Architect: Akio NAKASA(director), Daisuke AOKI

This Tokyo house by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has hardly any walls and looks like scaffolding (photos by Iwan Baan).

House NA has three storeys that are subdivided into many staggered platforms.

The few walls that do exist are mostly glass, making certain spaces secure without adding privacy.

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

See more images of this project on the photographer’s website.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

House like a single Tree

House standing within a residential district in central Tokyo.

To dwell in a house, amongst the dense urbanity of small houses and structures can be associated to living within a tree. Tree has many branches, all being a setting for a place, and a source of activities of diverse scales.

The intriguing point of a tree is that these places are not hermetically isolated but are connected to one another in its unique relativity. To hear one’s voice from across and above, hopping over to another branch, a discussion taking place across branches by members from separate branches. These are some of the moments of richness encountered through such spatially dense living.

By stratifying floor plates almost furniture-like in scale, throughout the space, this house proposes living quarters orchestrated by its spatio-temporal relativity with one another, akin to a tree. The house can be considered a large single-room, and, if each floor is understood as rooms, it can equally be said that the house is a mansion of multifarious rooms. A unity of separation and coherence.

Elements from furniture scales come together to collectively form scale of rooms, and further unto those of dwellings, of which renders the city.

The steps between the plates at times will become seating and desks, at times as a device segmenting a territory, and at times each akin to leaves of the foliage filtering light down into the space.

Providing intimacy for when two individuals chooses to be close to one another, or for a place afar still sharing each other’s being. For when accommodating a group of guests, the distribution of people across the entire house will form a platform for a network type communication in space.

The white steel-frame structure itself shares no resemblance to a tree.

Yet the life lived and the moments experienced in this space is a contemporary adaptation of the richness once experienced by the ancient predecessors from the time when they inhabited trees. Such is an existence between city, architecture, furniture and the body, and is equally between nature and artificiality.

Steel crossbeams divide the triple-height living room of this Tokyo townhouse into modular sections.

Designed by Japanese architects Junpei Nousaku, the small house in Shinjuku has a large set of windows stretched across its street-facing west elevation.

The roof pitches sharply away from this facade to create clerestory windows on the opposite wall that are a storey in height.

A kitchen, utilities room and bedroom are stacked up at the southern end of the house and overlook the living room like balconies.

Other recent houses we’ve published in Tokyo include one with a secret balcony and one with a seamless frosted facade. See all our stories about Tokyo by clicking here.

The text below is from Junpei Nousaku Architects:

We all want to create as wide and open a space as possible, even in a small house. However, city housing is often very closed to the city in Tokyo’s high-density districts.

In Tokyo, real estate has been fragmented by a rapidly increasing population density. 70 years from the end of World War 2, and the small houses were built crowded. Usually in such high-density districts, the small houses occupy the site maximum, and by stacking the floor vertically, in order to ensure the living area. But the internal space becomes divided by the stacked floors, resulting in the lower floor becoming darker than the upper floor.

In addition they tend to close by the wall because of the worry about the public gaze. It is cause by the building is not enough set back from the street. So in many cases, the ground floor is assigned to the entrance, vehicle parking and closed bathroom. That makes the residential districts feel like a lifeless, deserted place to someone on the street.

This problem is serious in Tokyo’s high-density districts.
 
Therefore, I have put the main family space, on the ground floor, and made it an open atrium-like space connecting the ground to the roof directly without enclosing the space with the floor above, resulting in a feeling of internal space beyond the scale of the housing. On the other hand, the beams run over in that space to allow for future expansion of the floor to match the change of the occupants’ life style.

In addition by taking off the majority of the exterior walls, this house becomes look like the three-story house was peeled off the floor and the walls. From behind the large windows, the occupants can expect to see various aspects of the neighborhood such as developing plant life, high-rise buildings and the occasional passer-by who has stopped to gaze at this unique and strange house.

This space is not complete and not stable, rather than complete as the safe house. But I believe that direct involvement and clash with the city by this non-completion and unstable makes human life open to the city environment.