A Tapestry of Facade Spaces Seamlessly Integrated with the Urban Landscape
This renovation project transformed a small tenant space into a shared office. Our goal was to create an interior space that integrates with the surrounding environment rather than closing it out—a space that becomes an extension of the streets it faces.
The space is located in a six-story reinforced-concrete apartment building at the corner of a three-way intersection, where a one-way street branches off from the traffic-heavy Meguro-dori Avenue. The area we renovated was a 30-square-meter space on the ground level, situated precisely at the corner. The small space has a nearly triangular floor plan, and in proportion to its size, it features large windows on three sides. The shared office accommodates two companies: a building firm and an architectural design office. Instead of dividing the space between the two companies, we divided it into three distinct areas based primarily on the activities that would take place within—office work, manual work, and meetings. We believed that dividing the space in this way would make it easier for the space to maintain a strong connection with the exterior and foster positive interaction with the surrounding area.
We used the existing large, street-facing windows as a guide when subdividing the original small space, turning the three areas into integrated peripheral facade spaces that create a strong sense of presence on the street. The meeting room, for example, takes on the appearance of a stage set or a veranda, with its metallic-textured curtains as a backdrop; the workshop space occasionally resembles a display window, engaging in a dialogue with the street. Further, as the space lacks a central room or a rear, each of the three peripheral facade spaces also serves as “inner space” relative to the others.
This project inspired us to take a closer look at collections of individual spaces and how they contribute to the overall atmosphere of cities, and it highlighted the importance of considering the overall cityscape and building off of those elements in our design.