TOKYO APARTMENTS SOUFUJIMOTO
TOKYO APARTMENTS Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects Design Phase: March 2006 - May 2009 Construction: May 2009 - March 2010 Total Floor Area: 180.70m2
The collective housing is a minature of Tokyo. It is a ‘Tokyo which never exists’ made into form.
LOCATION Tokyo Apartments is located in the Itabashi ward, within the Tokyo region of Japan. Its street address is 2 Chome-16-19 Komone, Itabashi, Tokyo, 173-0037, and is part of the suburban residential neighbourhoods of Tokyo. Fujimoto frames the Tokyo Apartments as a minature replica of the Tokyo that never exists, and its contextual placement plays into this idea. The suburban context of the project allows Fujimoto to explore the domestic concept of collective housing, and the experiential conflict that accompanies it.
JAPAN
TOKYO
ITABASHI
THE OWNER The owner of the Tokyo Apartments is an elderly Japanese man and he decided to build the apartment block six years after his wife had a stroke. His wife needs full time care, which he provides, and he is thus unable to work. He owned this block of land and needed to maintain an income whilst not working. He therefore approached Fujimoto and together they worked out the plan for the micro apartments, allowing him to rent to three units to tenants, and keep the fourth for him and his wife. Something that appears inexplicable from an Australian perspective is why the owner would take such a risk in terms of architectural form when his family survival was relying on the project. Nevertheless, the risk was approved and the project constructed.
TOKYO APARTMENTS The Tokyo Apartments is a communal housing project consisting of five dwelling units. Each dwelling consists of two or three different rooms, connected via the external stairs. The domestic space is realised by the ‘experience of linking two rooms and the city when passing along the outside stairs’. Fujimoto likens this external movement through the units to a mountain such as a city. And as such, the process of travelling up and down the mountain, ‘the whole city is experienced as part of your house’.
TOKYO APARTMENTS
External staircase leading to the topmost apartment These stairs are part of a contained unit, and demonstrate Fujimoto’s diagram of circulation within the units - moving from one room to another through an external staircase - and the city.
External staircases
The stairs function as outdoor hallways, though there removal from the interior into a public domain opens up a series of potential nuances and conflicts.
PLANS
SECTION
INTERIORS The interior spaces of the Tokyo Apartments are very simple. Fujimoto claims that “ the function equates to functionality that can emerge or be uncovered from locality, instead if a place made to accommodate human functions.�
Fujimoto also begins to address the interior spaces through their relationship with the exterior. Specifically, he refers to his upbringing in Hokkaido and the immediate transition between indoor and outdoor, in regards to climatic and scalar change. However he comments this process is dramatically blurred in Tokyo. The movement flows from the unit to the apartments block, onto small streets and then gradually onto wider and wider streets until reaching a culminating point of intensity. Fujimoto attempts to implement this process into his Tokyo Apartments. He claims the external stairs in the project blur the line between city and unit in a single intense moment. This assertion that the city becomes part of the house seems quite exaggerated. Perhaps Fujimoto has developed and investigated the connection between the internal and external spaces, however at most this alters the experience between the unit and the street. The idea that this formal move changes how the user occupies the city or spaces of high intensity is simply farcical.
DIAGRAMMAT DIAGRAMMAT
TICITY ICITY
The concept of the diagram, and subsequently its role in the definition of space, is a key discussion framework for the Tokyo Apartments.
The diagrammatic appearance of the Tokyo Apartments is a major focus for Fujimoto, when talking about his work. He claims that he is less interested in the diagrammatic nature of the form of the apartments, but rather what these prototypical-housing typologies can invoke for the user and the architecture itself. Most prominent of these spaces are the internal intersections between two shapes. The gabled roof is treated as if it doesn’t exist, and the stacking of these forms creates experiential moments where the user moves in a cat-like fashion through the interior space. This sequence of formal moves creates intrigue for each user as well as passers-by, as they glimpse either movement within the house or views of the city. In such a way, the project moves beyond the diagram and plays with experiential spaces.
Gabled roof connection
“In the Tokyo Apartment, one is first struck by the diagrammatic appearance of the pitched roof houses stacked on top of each other. I believe you’re concerned more with the possibilities inherent in those forms as pure phenomena, rather than being confined by the socio-historical inferences inculcated in roofs.” Ryue Nishizawa
Fujimoto’s claim that the house is non-diagrammatic hinders some of the most interesting possibilities of the project. Whilst he is then able to treat the house as an architectural poetry of experiences and quick glances, his likening of the house to a ‘mountain’ and furthermore the mountain to the city is somewhat ridiculous. He claims that the users pass through the ‘mountain/city’ as they ascend the stairs. Whilst this may be a small piece of poetic fiction, his refusal to acknowledge the houses diagrammatic form results in the ‘mountain/city’ statement becoming the defining thesis of the project. The potential conversation around domesticity, and Fujimoto’s exploration of beautifully designed and intricate micro-apartments appears to be a much more powerful lens to view the project through, however he neglects to do so.
Concept Model
It is clear that Fujimoto has carefully examined what this prototyping of apartment blocks could yield through the concept models of the project. It starts to show larger areas of micro apartments with irregular circulation and collection of dynamic spaces.
ISAAC HARRISSON