Archello Awards 2026 · Enter your projects before 30 September 2026
Archello Awards 2026 · Enter your projects before 30 September 2026
O_building
Koji Fujii

O_building

This is a plan for a three-story tenant building in Musashino City, Tokyo.
The site has a distinctive shape, like a flagpole, which connects both the North and the South side of the building. In this plan, we considered greatly the two roles of this shape. Firstly as a pathway to make the flow of people circulation and secondly as a carefully designed appearance directing people to fresh experience to walk through.

photo_credit Koji Fujii
Koji Fujii
photo_credit Koji Fujii
Koji Fujii

To fit the slant line regulation in the law of Japan, we adopted a plan to set back the building from the adjacent site by setting the external stairs on the sideway and creating a path below. As a result, the tenants in the building have a simple and equivalent composition on each floor. And this pathway connects the two roads north and south as a path through which people can walk freely through the gaps in the buildings. The site is in a commercial area and the buildings are built up to the edge of the lot. So it was expected that this pathway would always be dark and oppressive. As a solution, we planned to build a half mirror along the pathway.

photo_credit Koji Fujii
Koji Fujii
photo_credit Koji Fujii
Koji Fujii

The half-mirror fence meticulously picks up the changes in the light and shade of the sunlight that comes through the gaps throughout the day, reflecting the side dimensions of the building and the back side of the adjacent building on the other side. And we would occasionally notice the superimposing of the two views.

photo_credit Koji Fujii
Koji Fujii
photo_credit Koji Fujii
Koji Fujii

Rather than a simple solution of hiding the back of the building by making a flat wall, we created a distinctive pathway where people can feel the flow of the day and the changes in the sunlight by adopting a half-mirror wall plan. Moreover, we expect that the transformation of this rather dark oppressing pathway into an experience of walking in varied level of sunlight will surely change the quality of connection between surrounding buildings.

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