TOPAZ Shinokachimachi Residential Building / Yuko Nagayama & Associates

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This arc side of the building serves as a balcony for each unit, not only on the ground level. The rigid frame system of the building structure is set back to allow the balconies to cantilever, allowing a flexible expression of their design. Informed by this system, zigzag exterior walls are introduced in the plan. This zigzag not only allows an effective emergency evacuation strategy but also acts as a privacy partition from the next door neighbor while creating visual freedom from the apartment immediately across the alley. Mechanical appliances are placed away from the balcony space to maximize the openness to the exterior. Each balcony is v-shaped, which contributes to a perceptual framing of the view outward while effectively capturing the spatial openness of the interior. Also, residents find the balcony as a flexible and adaptive platform of curation that offers visual exchange to life outside.Similar to the neighboring buildings, our project was to be built to the maximum spatial allowance in order to increase the rentable area, which resulted in housing forty eight studio apartment units. After a number of design studies with regulatory and contextual constraints, the fan shape emerged. The arc of the fan breaks the grid of the existing urban fabric and creates communally open space, a spatial respite from the sea of buildings around it.Text description provided by the architects.This 15-story studio apartment is located in Shin Okachimachi, Tokyo. Having old market streets and artisan businesses scattered around, the area has been re-gaining its popularity today. As well as the charming presence of the historical scenes, the site is tightly surrounded by multistory post-war buildings and contemporary developments of apartment and office towers.The formal gestures that are born from the context and constraints give each unit not only efficient planning, but also unique directionality and frontality to the lives inside and outside.