Photographer: Satoshi Asakawa | ArchDaily

Himi Shinmachi Daycare Centre / Shio Architect Design Office

Miwa Negoro — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:00:00 +0000

This is a construction project for a new, two-storey wooden daycare centre, replacing a nursery built approximately 50 years ago. This project was secured through a selective tender process. In recent years, it has become increasingly challenging for design firms to secure public building projects. This tender system enables us to take on projects of a manageable scale, allowing us to enhance our expertise and build valuable experience.

“The Kind of Architecture I Try to Achieve Is a Rainbow:” In Conversation With Kengo Kuma

Vladimir Belogolovsky — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 05:00:00 +0000

In my 2008 interview with Kengo Kuma in Manhattan—the Tokyo-based architect was in town for a lecture at Cooper Union and to oversee the construction of a house renovation in nearby Connecticut— he summarized the intention of his work for me, "The closest image to the kind of architecture I try to achieve is a rainbow." The architect designs his buildings as a chef would prepare a salad or a florist arrange a bouquet of flowers—by carefully selecting ingredients according to their size, shape, and texture. He then tests whether they should touch, overlap, or keep a distance to let the airflow pass through. The process is closer to a trial-and-error scientific experiment rather than an artistic exercise in projecting visionary forms and images. Although his buildings surely look strikingly artistic and utterly breathtaking. They are both precise and loose, primitive and refined, material and transient. The architect's fascination with materiality is startling, and despite having completed many dozens of buildings all over the world over the course of his distinctive career, in our conversation last month over Zoom, Kuma told me, "I stand at the beginning of a long process of material exploration."

House ZPK / GoGo1122

Valeria Silva — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 02:00:00 +0000

In a community where nature endures and history unfolds with grace, there stood a house, 75 years in the making. This was an architect's personal project, breathing new life into an ancient dwelling. The neighborhood, a tapestry of a few homes, has remained unchanged since its urban planning a century ago. Three generations have called this place home, their bonds forged in shared classrooms from kindergarten through middle school. The allure of this land is evident in the care its inhabitants bestow upon their daily lives. Yet, as generations shift, migration to urban centers has begun, and the legal constraints of this district have hindered architectural evolution, leading to a peculiar "urban depopulation."

mokkado Café / MUKU design studio

Hana Abdel — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 02:00:00 +0000

“Mokkado” is a café organized by a 75-year-old pharmaceutical company based in Imizu City, Toyama Prefecture. The café is a renovation of a 100-year-old old house, the birthplace of the founder, and also a factory of a Toyama-based company that manufactures and sells medicine in a traditional Toyama style. The company, which now mainly handles Chinese herbal medicines along with a variety of healthy food products, will operate a café offering chai and shaved ice based on Chinese herbalism along with a corner where medicine can also be purchased.

House in Asagiri Kogen / Buttondesign

Hana Abdel — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 02:00:00 +0000

This is a farmhouse for a rancher located on the Asagiri Plateau in Shizuoka Prefecture. Fuji. As the name implies, the Asagiri Plateau is a ranching area located at the foot of the 870-meter-high mountain on the west side of Mt. When I visited the area for the first time; I was amazed at the rapidly changing weather conditions of the mountain and the completely different appearance of the landscape during a single day, depending on the tilt of the sunlight.

House in Shirsagi / Buttondesign

Hana Abdel — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 02:00:00 +0000

This is a plan for a house with a small baked sweets store located in a quiet residential area after passing through the shopping street in front of the station. Although the site is a flagpole lot, one long east side faces a large parking lot, so there is no particular sense of enclosure but rather an open feeling as if it were facing a park. Although the residents can enjoy the open environment for a while, this parking lot is also considered to be a fading thing like a park or a production green space, and the east side is a garden that adjusts the distance from the city.

Tabata Junior High School / Coelacanth K&H Architects

Bianca Valentina Roșescu — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 22:00:00 +0000

A Compact High-Rise School in Harmony with the Local Landscape. It is the junior high school planned on the site of the former Takinogawa 7th Elementary School as a part of the Kita City school restructuring plan. The site is a district in which the faint atmosphere of a novelist village called Tabata-Bunshimura from the Taisho period to the war period. And the north side with a large retaining wall formed from the topography is a valuable open space in this area adjacent to a temple.

7 Gates Lounge / Shio Architect Design Office

Hana Abdel — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 20:00:00 +0000

ZOZO Co., Ltd., which operates the fashion e-commerce site ZOZOTOWN, is planning to expand its distribution base. Our clients want the ease of use, scalability, and flexibility. To ensure this, we decided to divide our large one-room lounge into seven rooms and install sofa seating along the walls. Sofa seating has the advantage of being more expandable, less cluttered, and easier to organize.

Roseroc / Okuno Architectural Planning

Valentina Villa — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 22:00:00 +0000

"Roseroc" is created to function as an employee cafeteria as well as an employee activity hall with catering functions. The major sectors of this company are the manufacturing of cables and catheters for medial purposes and the “roseroc” is built in the premises of those factories. "roseroc" needed to function mainly for 3 major purposes - as an employee cafeteria where they can spend their lunch break hours comfortably and feeling refreshed after dedicating a lot of their time manufacturing cables and catheters in the clean room, then, as a multiple purpose space where employees can use the area for meetings, activities for recreation purposes and so on, and lastly, as a symbolic icon of the company who is eager to penetrate into the international market.

COCREA / bews / building environment workshop

Daniela Cardenas — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 19:00:00 +0000

Share-house "COCREA" began from a dream of "a place where all gather" of local activities circle HEMHEM of Ibaraki Christian University.

Farmus Kijimadaira / Starpilots

Karen Valenzuela — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 19:00:00 +0000

We renovated the former tomato processing plant to base the agricultural composite facilities for Sixth Industrialization (e.g., processing, sales, and other business undertaken integrally by agricultural businesses to increase the added value of products) in Kijimadaira, Nagano, Japan. It is located in an old plant site that the village purchased to regenerate.

Housecut / Starpilots

Karen Valenzuela — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 19:00:00 +0000

The concern about this project was that 2/3 of the site was under consideration of the city road-building plan. Because of this problem, the client family, who was running a funeral company at this place for a long time, desired:

House in Komae / architect cafe

Cristian Aguilar — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This site is situated in a suburb of Tokyo in an area that is in-between urban and countryside. There are many green areas and vacant spaces, but on the contrary some areas are occupied by closely-packed houses. Figuring out how to live in this city-like and countryside-like situation is the most important theme for this house, and this theme has been translated into creating a new relationship between inside and outside.

HOUSE-K / K2YT

Daniel Sánchez — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The site is situated amidst the densely packed residential area in Tokyo. Whilst being on a south west corner of the block having frontages to two streets, the elevated railway on the north posed issues of noise and vibration. The corner location offered opportunities for capturing light and air, but the contradiction was that doing so will call for mitigation of noise.

Kanazawa Umimirai Library / Coelacanth K&H Architects

Megan Jett — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Reading, for the sake of knowledge or enjoyment, or to explore the world of the human imagination, is one of those experiences that gives you a sense of emotional and spiritual richness quite different from economic or monetary well-being. In this sense, the act of creating a space that surrounds you with books is undoubtedly linked to the creation of a new, enriched sense of public values.