This is located in a highly fashionable district in the middle of Tokyo.
The five-story building is occupied by a jewelry store on the first four floors and a salon for public relations and customer services on the top floor. Each floor in plan consists of just a single space and a stairway.
The tiny site is 6.3 meters wide, 4.6 meters deep, and less than 30 square meters in area. My two basic design ideas were to adopt a structural system without columns in order to make effective use of the limited area and to make the overall structure as lightweight as possible in order to simplify the foundation.
A reinforced-concrete wall structure is used on the lower three floors. Panels fabricated from steel sheets in a factory were assembled on the site for the fourth and fifth floors. As a result, construction work was much like assembling a model of the building.
Grey pane glass, transparent glass and stainless mesh are layered on the facade of this urban building. The surface has the smoothness of glass but also the semblance of depth. Lighting installed between the overlapping materials gives the building a completely different look at night. This is an extremely small building, but I wanted it to be a delightful, jewel-like addition to the Tokyo townscape.
