Tomigaya Apartment
- location
- Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
- function
- residence
- size
- 1488.38 sqm.
- structure
- RC
- completion
- 2005
- credits:
- architect
- Satoshi Okada
- project team
- Kentaro Iyoda
Toru Kijima
Masayuki Kaneko - structural designer
- Mitsuhiro Kanada
Masamichi Sasaki
Ove Arup & Partners - general contractor
- Satohide Co. Ltd.
- photo credit:
- Koichi Torimura
-
The building is an apartment house composed of 7 type residences for 18 dwellings. It is a 9 story building with a hut for bicycle & garbage. Client is a private landowner, who used to make a 5 story apartment building at the same place 29 years ago, asked me to design a new one after demolishing old fashioned.
The site is located in a developing commercial district in Shibuya, 7 minute-walk from Tokyo Olympic Gymnasium by Kenzo Tange. It is on Inogashira Street, a major westbound road-network from the center of Tokyo. Since the Olympic year of 1964, with a rapid economic growth, Tokyo has been an ever-expanding city. Even today, major streets have incessantly been reconstructed for widening for dissolving terrible traffic jams caused by the reckless urban planning. Inogashira Street is not the exception. In these 5 years, it has been extended; as a result, only to the building on the Street, 9 to 10 story tall ones can be built under a setback regulation. tomigaya apartment is the first example under such new circumstances.
The urban fabric around the site is, therefore, disjunctive with modern sleazy commercial buildings on the large street vs. tiny traditional houses on capillary alleys behind. Besides on the Inogashira Street on north, the site faces two narrow strips on both south and west, which still have a small residential community; that is, the site is at the mouth tip from residential human scale to commercial bigger one. The site shape is irregular and its terrain is sloping down from north to south by 4 meter gap.
When I visited the site and walked around the backside residential area, I felt some difficulty to place a building of 9 stories, which is almost double height compared with commercial buildings along the Street, and even 4 to 5 times taller than private houses on alleys. I was in a dilemma between two poles; on one side, the architect is required to make a building to the maximum floor area and spatial volume on commercial demands, while on the other, he would not like to do it from a socio-ethical point of view; i.e. for preserving a human scale in the residential community. Thus, in this project, my challenge is how to design a big building in such a smaller urban context under the assumption that a big scale building is not appropriate in the environment.
First of all, I imagined a building composed of some masses in verticality, among which shadow clarifies their articulation. From the human eye level, building scale is more positively perceived by the width, not by the height, of each mass. Moreover, I expected these masses with an incoherent appearance by using different materials and colors as well as by making shadows with the depth of eaves. Among masses on façade, the most outstanding is the vertical circulation tower clad with hundreds of steel plates galvanized and then tarnished by phosphoric acid.
With small pieces of colten steel (10mm thick) in red and brown rusty color, I tied to enhance the incoherence against the wholeness of the building; at the same time, to maintain a coherence of continuity around the periphery of the site in terms of materiality, coloration, and curvedness in formation. The rusty small pieces are scattered to the main entrance shelter, the short fence for plantation on the main entrance porch, the hut for bicycle & garbage, and the long fence along the alley on south. I regard them as a scale adjuster between the main building and people. At the foot of huge, square, cool, and hard edge apartment building, the rusty beauties show their tiny, round, warm and soft edge characters, which enchant people with a curiosity to something mysterious.
The most notable figure is the hut for bicycle & garbage. At the northwest corner in the site, all the more because it is the tensest spot, I deliberately designed the hut for bicycle & garbage, which is usually regarded as an insignificant and literally a subordinate element. On the acute angle of 70 degree, with the terrain three-dimensionally distorted in accordance with the inclined alley down from north to west, I intuitively wished to make such “a petty building” become “a pretty architecture” with intensity, or I might mention, the most prestigious house for bicycle and garbage in the world. Accordingly, I thought that it must be enough attractive to make people suspended of their looking at the main building. It should be alienated from eyes of people walking around, and fully enigmatic beyond expression. It is as if it were an alien surviving with pabulum of dissimilation. In other words, it is the last bulwark where I might express an essentiality of architectural design beyond commercialism. On the same line, even in the main building, I charged the intensity to the charcoal-silver tower, just for a vertical circulation, and not for a functionally profitable element. Interestingly enough, both elements are totally remote from commercialism.
On “intensity of thing,” for a decade, I have pursued for realizing the essence of fascination in thing itself; then, in short, I define that the intensity is the nature of thing that makes one’s verbalization suspended. It is, in a secular word, attributed to the instantaneous sense of pelle d’oca, when one is impressed surprisingly at something beyond expectation. It might be a momentary tension of sense, which could be referred to aesthetics of beauty, and even of ugliness as well.
apartment building
The main building is made of reinforced concrete structure, and basically composed of three towers, among which thin slabs made of concrete of 150mm are inserted on each floor. Towers contain dwellings, while the connecting plates provide horizontal circulations. 14 dwellings from the 1st to the 6th floor are rent out, while 4 residences from the 6th to 9th floor are allotted to owner’s family.
One is a circulation tower placed along the front street, around the center of the building façade. It contains a vertical circulation of elevator and emergency stairs as well as equipment for gas, water, and electricity. The charcoal-silver color comes from galvanized steel plates tarnished by phosphoric acid. The arbitrary pattern becomes darker and darker with its oxidation with sulfur in the contaminated air in the metropolis. Second, the east end tower is arranged along other commercial buildings on the front row. It is composed of a flat wall on the eastside border, a slender enclosure containing water sections, and a tube-like space in-between. The third south tower is slightly shifted from both those above. It has 3 types of residence, one of which, in particular, has a double story space of transparency in cooperation with the space in-between the west end white wall. Both the 8th and the 9th floors, 3 towers are combined into a family house; the east end tower provides bedroom and bathroom: the south tower is for living, dining, and kitchen: and the west end space is a spare room for living.
hut for bicycle & garbage
Under the architectural regulation of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, any apartment building is required to accompany a bicycle shed and a garbage place in each site. When I started planning these tiny urban facilities, I had an idea to make them together into a single hut because both of them, equally, have to be at the spot easily accessible for residents and sanitarian workers as well. After reviewing a common inclination that they are seldom cherished in any apartment building, in this project, I tried or even wished to illuminate the facilities forgotten at some backyard corner of showy main buildings. I imagined it as if it were a chapel, a sacred space of human scale, and therefore I felt that it must be born with an arbitrary shape not by any rule like a cliché formula, theory, or a stereotyped method of making, but by leaving its birth to my own spark, which is also an enigma to myself. Under an emancipated condition from anything dogmatic, I respected an impulse to generate something that I hoped to do at the place, and at the moment.
In the process of design, soon after I roughly sketched my images on papers, I rushed into making many models with a flexible paper. In the abstract models, I imagined a continuity of a strip, with which I tried to make an enclosure into two portions; one is for bicycles, and the other is for garbage. Finally I reached a balanced model, still tentative indeed, and made it scanned for fixing dimensions in a practical drawing. Therefore there is no profound reason in each number of the dimensions; yet I might describe that the human impulse be replaced with the dimensions in creating something real to the real world. In fact, today, I do notice its importance of the freedom of design with related to the word of “intensity.” Something truly beautiful, for instance, does not need any word for appreciation; or rather even if any word were as enough as arranged, the verbalization be always imperfect in front of intensity in the object, or in a mirrored image in the subject.
Text by Satoshi Okada
- drawing
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- publications
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Innovative Apartment Buildings, LinksInternational, Barcelona, Spain, 2007, pp. 112-123.
Vivendas Sociales (Social Highrises), Monsa, Barcelona, Spain, 2006, pp. 40-51.
Casabella, vol. 738, Electa, Italy, Nov. 2005, pp. 50-53.
