This is a site we visited twice.
The first time was with a client who in the end decided nothing could be made of the land-locked property, sitting as it does at the end of a long and twisting narrow road. After a few exercises to test the site and the kinds of home that could be made on it we were informed it would not do, and the project was abandoned.
Shortly after, and entirely by chance, a separate client approached us and asked if the unusual features of this odd piece of land he had found could be overcome. It was the same property. He was worried because he had seen residents of the area backing their cars over hundreds of meters, turning corners and slowly backing down the narrow roads in reverse, just to park on their own land. Worse, in this case the narrow road dead-ended against two properties, meaning only half of its 4 meter width could be used to enter the site. If this was not enough, the land was surrounded on three sides by houses built to their legal limits and crowding the walls that hemmed the site. The pressure of the city was relieved only to the West, where the presence of a large wedding complex ensured a piece of space and some greenery that probably would stay open for some time.
We replied immediately that this was a special property and we knew exactly how to tackle the job - within a week we were asked to take up the project again. In its second incarnation we were required to make a home for a young family, maximising the legal floor area possible on the site, solving parking for two cars, and at the same time finding a way to avoid making the dark autistic spaces that typically emerge from that program.
In Japan the building code enforces an envelope under which a building must fit. The rules are designed to guarantee access to light for neighbours, which makes sense in a dense urban environment like Tokyo. Ironically, on a landlocked parcel of the type we were given the rules also ensure the lower levels of any building constructed will be submerged in shadow. The most common solution for many Tokyo-ites is to simply live in the dark. The reason is simple - the building code ensures the largest floor areas are available on the lowest floors, and the understandable impulse is to design a home to be as big as possible and to place the daily living spaces on the ground floor where rooms can be made largest. A Tokyo lifestyle is as a result often dark and introverted.
Here we took a different tack, and reversed the standard typology – the main bedrooms are on the second floor; parking, a hard-surface landscape, and a guest room are on the ground floor, and the living areas are lifted to the top of the home where they are connected to the city by a series of decks and a stairway to a large roof garden.
In a city like Tokyo space is a luxury. By keeping the ground level open the city becomes a kind of backdrop to the entrance. In the same way the decks and balconies that open the home to the city at higher levels creates an enormous outdoor space that would otherwise be impossible in the city centre, on a site like this.
Project team: Koen Klinkers, Will Galloway, Max Kim, Iwao Takeuchi
