A five un it multiple housing forrent i n Shinagawa, Tokyo. The client’ soriginal program was for?5 equal independent houses. Our implemented proposal was to maximize the site’s capacity by recomposing the 5 houses together with the site 3-dimensionally into a composite, while keeping the spatial and atmospheric properties of an independent house.
In addition to the vertical party walls as seen in conventional terrace houses,horizontal “party floors” were introduced resulting in 2 types of 3-dimensionally intertwined units having contrasting residential spatial characters; units occupying the 1st and 2nd floors with a ground level garden and units on the 2nd and 3rd floors with a roof level garden. Each of the gardens have a tree planted part and a wooden deck. The deck occurs as an intermediate zone between the interior and the green adding a horizontal extension to the living space
In this 3 story spatial structure the living and bedroom zones of coinciding units are layout so that they do not meet vertically thus spatially solving noise problems at the same time.
The building is divided into blocks as a reaction to the residential scale of the surrounding area, avoiding the massiveness of conventional multiple housing. The spatial structure adopted in this project hints a solution on issues of living together and the growing diversity of lifestyles in the city.