Photographer: Takumi Ota | ArchDaily

Coffee or Tea: Third Places, Kiosks, and the Retail Architecture of Duration

Jonathan Yeung — Sun, 24 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

"Coffee or tea?" is one of those phrases that follows you across contexts: asked on airplanes, after a meal, in hotel lounges, and in meeting rooms. It sounds like a small question—mere preference, a quick fork in the service script. Yet it also carries a quiet cultural inheritance. Tea arrives with the long history of ritual and domestic pacing, tied to older geographies of trade and everyday etiquette. Coffee arrives with a different lineage of circulation, later industrialized into the modern café and its public-facing rituals. In both cases, the drink is never only a drink; it is a practiced relationship to time and space.

From Tradition to Modern Living: The Versatility and Elegance of Timber in 12 Japanese Interiors

Susanna Moreira — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Contemporary Japanese architecture continues to demonstrate how to adapt the evolving needs of modern residents to a rich building tradition and artisanal legacy. Wood has always been the soul of Japanese architecture. In many recent residential projects, this material transcends its structural role to become the primary finish for various surfaces — ranging from floors and ceilings to furniture and architectural elements. These environments strike a delicate balance between elegance and coziness.

Cloud Terrace / CLOUD ARCHITECTS

Miwa Negoro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:00:00 +0000

The architect's office and private residence, located in a suburban residential area of Kobe. The site faces two roads—one to the south and one to the north. The southern side faces a 26-meter-wide arterial road lined with large commercial facilities. The northern side, however, faces a 6-meter-wide residential street in a quiet neighborhood. Furthermore, while the southern half of the site is flat, the northern half is a sloped area with a gradient of approximately 30 degrees, resulting in a height difference of about 5.5 meters between the north and south.

Circular Composites: Designing for a Sustainable Future

Kiana Buchberger — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 06:45:00 +0000

The pursuit of stronger, lighter, and more durable materials has guided architecture long before polymers or carbon fibers existed. One of the earliest large-scale examples of composite materials can be found in the Great Wall of China, where stone, clay bricks, and organic fibers such as reeds and willow branches were blended to create a resilient and lasting structure. These early techniques reveal a timeless intuition: distinct materials, when combined thoughtfully, produce properties unattainable by any single element. As the construction sector faces urgent ecological pressures, this intuition is being revisited through the lens of sustainability, with architects and engineers exploring bio-based, recycled, and hybrid composites designed not only for performance but also for circularity and environmental responsibility.

Green Interiors Trends From Around The World

Hana Abdel — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 07:30:00 +0000

There is not enough that can be said about the benefits of incorporating plants in interiors or Plantscaping. Integrating vegetation indoors serves many purposes, whether practical, aesthetic, or psychological. Although there are basic requirements for incorporating greenery into Homes, well-thought-out plant selections and placements are characteristically different across the world. By going over recent interior works, a few recurrent plantscaping design patterns arose, each reflective of distinctive climates, building styles, and traditional building techniques.

Designing with Smoke: The Chimney as Architectural and Environmental Instrument

Olivia Poston — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Chimneys are among the most quietly persistent elements in architectural history. Yet their presence persists in nearly every cultural and climatic context, serving as a technical feature and a spatial, atmospheric, and symbolic device. It populates dense city skylines and anchors rural horizons alike, its vertical silhouette as ordinary as a window or a doorframe. This apparent ordinariness is deceptive. The chimney is one of the few architectural components that links the intimate scale of interior life with the expansive forces of the environment. For architects and designers, the necessity of the chimney presents a choice: to let it recede quietly into the building's functional fabric or to amplify it as a central, expressive element that shapes a project's identity.

Raw Interiors: 35 Projects that Use Exposed Wood and Concrete

Paula Pintos — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 07:30:00 +0000

Interior design has been characterized by infinite alternatives in coatings, finishes, and furniture to achieve unique and unrepeatable spaces. Designers are constantly coming up with innovative solutions and materials specifically created for a distinctive spatial perception. However, there is also a trend that seeks the warmth of the interior spaces by exposing the raw building materials as they are. The richness of materials such as wood and concrete gives that feeling of durability and low maintenance that, combined with an attention-to-detail design, makes spaces look warm yet stay true in essence. See below for 35 examples of interior spaces where concrete and wood appear in their almost purest state.

i-Ap Apartment / Soeda and associates Architects

Miwa Negoro — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 02:00:00 +0000

The road that borders the south side of the site is a culvert that was once the old Kanda River, which meandered through this area. This natural river was modernized for flood control and was slightly rerouted to become a straight, artificial river running north to south. Meanwhile, the original river was landfilled and turned into a narrow street, and the surrounding area was developed into residential land. With its series of fragmented alleyways without clear visibility, the streetscape gives a physical sensation of familiarity, which sets it apart from modernized city blocks.

Sonata2 Apartment / Soeda and associates Architects

Miwa Negoro — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 02:00:00 +0000

This project involves a four-unit apartment building in a suburban area. The site is a narrow, irregularly shaped, and almost triangular lot flanked by two roads intersecting at an acute angle. The northern road is a legally recognized road under the Building Standards Act, while the southern path is a culvert, so the road setback regulations only apply to the northern road.

House on the Rias Coast / no.10 NOMURA Co., Ltd.

Miwa Negoro — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 02:00:00 +0000

The site overlooks the Sea of Japan in front of the house, and the entire area is known as a scenic spot with its intricate Rias coastline and dynamic topography known as "cave gate". On the other hand, if you look at the surrounding area, you will find a labyrinth of alleys that create a unique townscape. This is a unique feature of the area, which has a square-shaped configuration called "Masu-gata" with cranked intersections to prevent northerly winds from blowing through.

Yushima Building / Tenhachi Architect & Interior Design

Miwa Negoro — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 02:00:00 +0000

A Wooden Outline that Embraces the City – Located near Kanda Myojin Shrine in central Tokyo, this project sits on a narrow 5.2m x 14.5m lot facing the historic Nakasendo route, with a direct view of the iconic Yushima Seido. In this dense urban environment, surrounded by similarly tall buildings, the design focuses on how to softly blur the building's outline within the cityscape rather than assert dominance.

Exploring Showroom Interiors: The Art of Displaying Materials, Furniture, and Design Objects

Agustina Iñiguez — Wed, 28 May 2025 07:30:00 +0000

When creating exhibition spaces, the design of the experience, the proposed route, and the transmission of certain perceptions and senses contribute to establishing different bonds and connections between the displayed objects and their visitors. Understanding a showroom as a space designed to creatively and experientially showcase products and services, what design strategies could enhance users’ interior experiences? How does interior design engage in dialogue with exhibition architecture?

“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."

Blue Bottle Coffee Toyosu Park Cafe / Jo Nagasaka + Schemata Architects

Hana Abdel — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 03:00:00 +0000

This was the first commission for designing a new cafe building among the Blue Bottle Coffee projects we have undertaken to date. The site is in Toyosu Park overlooking Tokyo Bay, a seaside urban park frequented by locals as a place to relax while enjoying views of the skyscrapers.

TAGI Hair Salon / SIDES CORE

Hana Abdel — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:00:00 +0000

This project is an independent salon for a stylist couple. As they used to belong to two separate salons, they have different client lists, so we combined cozy personal spaces with more expansive areas so that each can welcome their clients in comfort.

JINS Holdings Tokyo Head Office / Fumiko Takahama Architects

Hana Abdel — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This project is a relocation of the Tokyo headquarters of JINS HOLDINGS, an eyewear brand with more than 700 shops in Japan and abroad. The new building is a nine-story building scheduled for demolition in three years' time. It was rented entirely and fully renovated based on two concepts: "Create space by demolishing" and " Museum x Office." The "Create space by demolishing" means creating spaces with a subtractive design, stripping off finishes, and opening up holes in the slab while minimizing the amount of new construction as much as possible, considering decarbonization. The rough space that emerges from this process provides workers with a proactive environment where they can improve their work area by devising new ways of working, rather than a passive environment in which everything is set for them. The Museum x Office is intended to reconfigure the space generated by literally demolishing parts of the building as a place where the ideas and creativity of the people can be stimulated, like an art museum.

Shodoshima the Gate Lounge / VUILD Inc.

Hana Abdel — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 02:00:00 +0000

VUILD completes ‘Shodoshima the GATE LOUNGE, ‘proposing a new relationship between designers and clients overcoming challenges to establish a supply chain on a remote island by only using resources on the island.

The Learning Architecture for Learners Welcome Center / VUILD Inc.

Hana Abdel — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 06:00:00 +0000

This facility, “The Learning Architecture for Learners,” was constructed as a project of the Educational Incubation Center's Explayground,’ which promotes collaborative efforts between industry, government, and academia at Tokyo Gakugei University, Japan.