PROJECTS

A studio apartment as one state of the building

GRID is a studio apartment building consisting of 12 small units with minimal equipment. To maximize the land use as an investment property, the maximum volume calculated from the slant-plane and slant-line regulations was filled with 20 square meter studio units and minimum common space to comply with Toyonaka City’s Studio Apartment Ordinance (unit area of 20 square meters or more, mandatory parking lot, etc.) and to ensure a floor area of approximately 300 square meters calculated from the allowable floor area ratio. However, these are the figures merely at the time of completion, as one state in the life cycle of the building. Since the client inherited the site from their grandparents, it holds sentimental value to them, who had always wished to return and live there someday. Respecting such sentiments, we aimed to design a project timeline that spans 50 years or even a hundred years.

A far-seeing structure

The building is a one-hour semi-fireproof mixed structure (for wooden three-story collective housing standard), consisting of 350-millimeter square reinforced concrete pillars embedded with wooden walls, floors, and roofs. For the exterior, we used concrete pillars to ensure wind pressure resistance and made the walls with 45-millimeter square cedar base sheets. The interior ceiling comprises relatively large wooden beams and exposed 12.5-millimeter gypsum board, layered double for a semi-fireproof structure. With the combination of rigid concrete and softer wooden frame, the building has the potential of flexibly adjusting to not only the 2D layout but the 3D composition, such as creating 40 square meter 1LDKs (apartments consisting of a living, dining, and kitchen area with a bedroom) and 80 square meter duplexes by demolishing the slabs. We aimed to realize a piece of “architecture in a transient state” that quietly awaits future transformations.


Architecture in dialogue with the past and the present

The site is located in the residential area of Toyonaka, developed by Ichizo Kobayashi, the founder of Minoo Arima Electric Tramway (Hankyu Corporation), as one of the development projects centered around the company’s railway stations. We aimed to create a building that would blend as much as possible into the town, characterized by a human-scale environment, where the presence of residents can be sensed from houses surrounded by greenery and wooden exterior walls and fences. Although reinforced concrete Rahmen construction tends to give a static impression, we achieved a sense of lightness and scale by actively incorporating elements such as columns thinned out from the piloti to make a parking space; floors divided east and west into split-level floors to improve the efficiency of the common areas; and details that conform to legal requirements, such as the staircase directly open to the outdoor environment to fulfill the wooden three-story collective housing standard. Furthermore, we adopted burnt cedar cladding for the exterior walls and planted a variety of local native plants and unique horticultural plants on the site to link the building and the townscape.