Contemporary Japanese Design : Junya Toda Architect & Associates
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Building in Tanigami : gallery + office
The site for the building lies in a hugely developed area in northern Kobe. It is accessible from the center of the city in 10 minutes by car through a tunnel. The area can be expressed as a land where only infrastructure is imported from the city. The area has already lost a large part of natural environment, but it is not quite urbanized yet. In a way, the surroundings create fictional scenery.
The site in such environment is an object for leasehold, therefore, the building on this site is destined to vanish in 20 years before the actual material lifetime. That is to say, this building only exists while the area is in the process of urbanization. During the period, the building functions as a gallery and an office.
I aimed to design an architecture which exaggerates the subtleness of the existence of the site. In order to achieve it, I chose a passive method to reconstruct only the given condition.
The factors extracted from the environment are membranes and frames. The structural factors which compose this small building are even more ramified, and those small elements are compound with glass to form membranes together. The membranes wrap around the successive frames like the urban infrastructure, taking in the surroundings such as telephone poles and greenery. The boundary thickens, and the line between inside and outside become vague. As the result, the openness and minimum privacy are achieved at the same time.
The stairs pierces outward through this thickened boundary. It expresses to the street that the building is a staircase itself. It implies that this big "staircase" is a transparent medium where people, nature, and many other things that go through here earn relationships to each other.
Gallery & Office Building in Tanigami - Building Information:
Owner: Tatsumi Iwashita
Architect: Junya Toda Architect & Associates
Photographer: Miyoji Ueda, Yoshiyuki Hirai, Junya Toda Architect & Associates
Completion Date: Jul 1999
Address: Yamada-cho, Kita-ku, Kobe-city, Hyogo-pref, Japan
Site Area: 128.12sqm
Total Floor Space: 120.37sqm
First Floor Space: 42.16sqm
Second Floor Space: 57.63sqm
Parking Space: 20.58sqm
Structure: Steel Framed Structure
Exterior Wall: Float Glass
Floor: Cedar
Interior Wall: Float Glass
Ceiling: Plasterboard, V.P.
Building in Tanigami photos / information from Junya Toda Architect & Associates Dec 2008
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Tanigami Building : page - adrian welch / isabelle lomholt
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