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
-
Tomigaya apartment was built 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 city center. Since the Olympic year of 1964, Tokyo has been expanding with a rapid economic growth. Even today, major streets have incessantly been reconstructed for widening for dissolving terrible traffic jams caused by the past reckless urban planning. In these 5 years, the Street has been extended; as a result, tall buildings, almost double higher than before, can be permitted by the new regulation. tomigaya apartment was the first example.
The site environment is disjunctive with both modern sleazy commercial buildings on the big street and tiny traditional houses on capillary alleys behind. The site is at the mouth tip from the small residential community to the large urban commercial area with 4 meter gap sloping down from the street front to the alley behind.
It is 9 story building composed of 7 type residences for 18 dwellings with a shed for bicycle & garbage at the corner with a distorted terrain. I designed the main building exterior articulated into three blocks, and made an incoherent appearance by using different materials, colors, and proportions. The tower at the center contains a vertical circulation of elevator, emergency stairs, and equipment ducts. The charcoal-silver color comes from galvanized steel plates tarnished by phosphoric acid. The east end tower, on the left, is designed as continuity from the neighbor buildings. It is composed of a flat wall on the eastside border, a slender enclosure containing water sections, and a single story apartment is piled up in-between. The south tower, on the right, is slightly shifted from both those above. It contains 3 types of residence, one of which, in particular, has a double story space defined by a white wall at the west end. On both the 8th and the 9th floors, those 3 towers are combined into a large house for the owner family. The east end tower provides bedroom and bathroom; the south tower is for living, dining, kitchen; and the west end is used for a study.
Further, I added some tiny elements around the main figure enough attractive to obliterate the vertical giants from one’s consciousness. The rusty dark browns made of 1 cm thick Corten Steel play roles of main entrance, shed for bicycle & garbage, retaining wall with a cubicle box on the south boundary, and plant-box on the entrance porch. They enhance the incoherency 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 the curved figures. I charge them with a scale adjuster between the main building and people walking around. At the foot of huge, square, cool, and hard edge apartment building, the rusty figures show their tiny, round, warm and soft edge characters for enchanting people with a curiosity to something mysterious. They should be alienated from people walking around, and fully enigmatic beyond expression. They are as if they were aliens surviving with pabulum of dissimilation.
Text by Satoshi Okada
- drawing
-
- publications
-
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.
