Treehouse in Shopping District

This is a three-story house planned for a shopping street in Nakano Ward.

The site is approximately 40 square meters with a frontage of 3,6 meters. The width of a train car in Tokyo is about 3 meters. The width of a train car in Tokyo is about 3 meters, and the site was only large enough to accommodate three vertically stacked train carriages. In this sense, we are very proud of our design, but above all, we are proud of the owner, Kondo, who decided to live on this land when the site was cleared! The structure of the house was designed with the first and second floors built in the same way as the first and second floors.

The first and second floors are RC, and the third floor is made of wood to reduce the weight of the structure, while the columns and external staircase that support the third floor are enlarged to serve as a boundary between the town and the living space.

The ratio of the smallness of the building to the size of the building amplifies the sense of presence, which is translated into a sense of distance from the town.

The house is intended to be a treehouse-like structure that engulfs the shopping district environment in a wilderness-like setting, and to make the city look like a forest.

Mimicry: Architecture pretending to be a city

Mimicry is the act of animals and insects hiding themselves by assimilating into their environment. Weak creatures such as the chameleon and the rhinoceros beetle are said to protect themselves from natural enemies by assimilating their own body color and patterns into their environment. I believe that the environment in which small urban architectures are born and born again is similar to the environment of such creatures in the natural world.

Although they can only obtain a small piece of land, the more urban they are, the more they are aware of their own boundaries, so every time a building is constructed, the boundaries increase and the number of enemies around it increases.

So why not pretend that architecture is a city?
Then, before you know it, your house will become the city itself, and you may think, “Wow, this city itself is my home! You may think, “Wow, this town itself is my home!

I am always thinking about that.
I am looking forward to the future!

Lot size: 39.7m2
Building area: 28.5m2
Total floor area: 77.1 m2　
　　　
Structure: Nawaken Gym / Kenji Nawa, Hitomi Shimoda
Construction: Tezuka Corporation
Cooperation: Hira Kaji Ayumi Obara (custom steel work), Yoshikazu Fukasawa (special wood work) Katsumata Lumber (special lumber), Hatano Wataru (Japanese paper production), Takahashi En (planting)