MMAAA / Tatsuro Miki + Ryosuke Motohashi

Impasse as a common space of the city

This building is located in the western suburbs of Tokyo. Since the construction rate is 60% and the volume rate is 300%, the image of this area guided by urban planning is a landscape where middle and high-rise buildings are lined up while leaving 40% of the vacant land that guarantees the living environment. In fact, the road width around the site is narrow and the site is fine, so a dense low-rise residential area is spreading. In addition, there are many corner areas in the city block, so the buildings that have been eased in the construction rate are lined up, and you can't see the expected 40% open space. Especially along the front road of this site, like a block-type building, buildings are lined up with no gaps in the frontage. If you think of the urban block of Western Europe, there may be a series of well-organized facades, but here, detached houses and apartment complexes on a custom scale are lined up in pieces.

In such a atmosphere, this apartment complex is planning 14 one-room units and 8 maisonette units. In the height of 10 meters where there is no shade regulation, as a business, we want to reduce the common areas and maximize the floor area as much as the construction rate allows. It is a division of the front (Building A) and the back (Building B), and Building A has a base that is not included in the construction rate as a direct access, and the other is aggregated by the staircase room and the bridge without a common corridor. 40% of the open space is simply consolidated between the roadside and the building vplumes, and is connected by a large piroti that is disproportionate to the scale of the surrounding buildings.

From the narrow road facing the site, it passes through the piroti in a continuous way and stops at the open space between the residential buildings. It's like an "impasse" (cul-de-sac) found in block-type cities. If it rains, the elderly in the neighborhood will sit on the base and get through the rain, and it will be a place where children on their way home from school accumulate. This impasse is not a public space, nor is it intended for specific purposes, but it is a place where anyone can stop by at any time. It is like a common spave of the city that belongs to both this architecture and the city.