Tag Archives: tokyo

This tiny house in Tokyo boasts of a funnel-shaped roof that doubles as a skylight!

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Moving to Tokyo with his wife, architect Takeshi Hosaka found a tiny nook of the urban world to build his modest, single-story, micro-home. The tiny home, called Love2 House occupies a total of around 30 meters of Tokyo pavement in the Bunkyo district, decreasing the total area of their previous living space by seven meters. Hosaka designed his Tokyo-based micro-home with both simple pleasure and realistic practicality in mind.

Inspired by Roman villas, Hosaka aimed to bring the restful repose that comes with country living to the city world, so he focused on how he could create a home that catered to studying, bathing, the theater, music, and gastronomy. The micro-home is equipped with a bathroom, which includes a toilet and washing area, a bedroom that shares an entry with a small, outdoor garden space, a practical kitchen area to concoct healthful meals, a study and dining table area for lounging or productivity, and finally a storage area where the laundry facilities and bulkier, electronic items are found. Love2 House embraces the natural bustle of the Tokyo lifestyle by easily slipping into a vacant alcove between two traditionally urban living spaces, and also encases a full, 19 meters of living space between its reinforced concrete walls. Crowning the concrete micro-home is the main event, Hosaka’s funnel-roof.

Hosaka had to prepare for three months of winter, during which his Love2 House would not receive any direct sunlight. Hosaka’s solution was a curved roof whose exposed vertex produced a pocket of skylight to fill up the single-story micro-home with plenty of natural bright light from the sun, no matter the season. On the winter daylight dilemma, Hosaka says,  “In the winter, the two skylights effectively bring soft sunlight into the house and in the summer the house is filled with brilliant sunshine like in a tropical country.” The roof is also protected from weather changes and forces for the exterior panels are clad with galvanized aluminum, which helps preserve metallic surfaces from rusting due to corrosion and oxidation. The unexpected largeness of the micro-home comes through with the slightly curved, tall ceilings that seem to expand the entire floor space with lots of open-air and natural sunlight. While living in one of today’s busiest cities, Hosaka managed to attain the pleasures of country living by architecturally sculpting and designing both into and around the 30 meters of Tokyo pavement where Love2 House nestles.

Designer: Takeshi Hosaka

A glittering timber pavilion in Tokyo is preparing for a journey back home to the Hiruzen Mountains!

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In the heart of Harumi, Japan, Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA), an architecture firm based in Japan, have designed a semi-open and temporarily placed pavilion for art performances, events, and showcases that will be deconstructed and repurposed in the future for another pavilion located in Hiruzen National Park of Japan’s Okayama Prefecture. Similar to the mountain’s summit in Hiruzen, Kengo Kuma’s pavilion was built and layered in such a way that depicts a melding of both the shoulder of a rocky mountain and a greenhouse drenched in sunlight.

The designers behind Harumi’s temporary pavilion used a steel frame as the structure’s base, over which CLT panels were overlaid to create a multi-paneled facade that spirals and crests towards the open sky. CLT panels, or Cross-Laminated Timber, are appealing for their prefabricated, lightweight yet durable quality and their neat installation process which has a low overall environmental impact. While the CLT panels form a zig-zag pattern and overlap one another from their orthogonal gluing process, exposed gaps of open-air needed covering. Preparing for fits of bad weather, KKAA bordered the gaps of air with transparent pieces of copolymer film called, TEFKA. On the reasoning behind choosing TEFKA to board up the pavilion, Dr. Kengo Kuma said that the weather-resistant film, “is lighter than glass and so pliable as to be rolled to transport it. It is [the] ideal material for relocation and reconstruction. It also has the perfect transparency we have sought.”

By implementing clear, glass-like plastic film to maintain a closed space within the pavilion, while maintaining the zig-zag pattern of the CLT patterns, shadows of sunlight turn this public pavilion into a glittering forest maze during peak sunlight hours. Additionally, inside the interior exhibition, odes to the natural world and forestry run rampant. In rooms like, “The Forest Room,” tornado-like, crossed panels of timber resemble the monolithic vigor and longevity of wooded forests. The CLT panels were made and provided by Meiken Lamwood Corporation in Maniwa, using timber from Japanese Cypress trees, obtained from Japan’s Okayama Prefecture, where the team at Kengo Kuma plan on relocating their semi-open-air pavilion. From the materials used to build this communal, natural space to the upcoming big move back to the CLT Park’s roots all work together in reminding us of how close we remain to the natural world and of the inevitable journey back for each of us.

Designer: Kengo Kuma and Associates

Apple Maps’ Street View-like feature expands to cities in Japan

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So far, Apple Maps’ Street View-like Look Around feature has only been available in select cities in the US. However, it has now expanded internationally for the first time, coming to four cities in Japan: Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Kyoto. That means y...

Cyberattack forces Honda to suspend global production for a day

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Honda was forced to suspend global production for a day due to a cyberattack that infiltrated the company's internal servers in Tokyo, Financial Times reports. Honda detected the virus on Monday and was forced to send some employees home for the day...

The tech-laden Tokyo Olympics have been postponed

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has finally accepted that the summer games in Tokyo can't go ahead. Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, asked Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, for a delay on the phone earlier today. The coronavirus pan...

Watch as this large crystal-like installation turns Tokyo’s landscape into kaleidoscopic art

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Looking almost like a ripple in time and space, Vincent Leroy’s Illusion Lens bends light in a way that makes you double-take. The illusory installation, which has found its way on the terrace of a building in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills, is a geodesic structure, comprising multiple fresnel lenses (flat lenses with multiple spherical rings).

Sitting at the very center of a helipad on Mori Tower, in one of Tokyo’s most affluent districts, the Illusion Lens bends looks like a literal jewel, as it bends light in ways that make everything around it appear as fragments inside it, combining the cityscape as well as the sky above. ‘Far from the noise and activity of the Japanese megapole it is an incredible place for contemplation. it’s the best place to be close the clouds of Tokyo’, says Vincent. It rotates ever so gently throughout the day, refracting, reflecting, and remixing, like a massive kaleidoscope.

The fresnel lenses (originally designed to help lighthouse beams propagate further) are joined together without any seams to form a seamless buckyball that makes the installation look like a cut, clear jewel. In the day, it becomes a place of contemplation and reflection, as clouds, skies, and buildings merge together in a symphony of polygons, and at night, the artpiece comes alive with a thousand reflections of the city’s lights.

Designer: Vincent Leroy

Asics’ Gel-Quantum running shoe gets a special Tokyo 2020 makeover!

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Created by the Gold Partner of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Asics has released a special edition of their Gel-Quantum running shoes with a vibrant color gradient and the Tokyo 2020 branding on the sides as well as the shoe tongue and rear. The shoes come with gel-cushioning in the rearfoot and forefoot and were created as a special commemorative series for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. I imagine the rainbow gradient would look absolutely fantastic when in motion, and I don’t see why this shouldn’t become a collectible item sometime in the future!

Designer: Asics