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Torus
Torus
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Project of the Day on Aug 14, 2016
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Other Projects by N Maeda Atelier
Torus
Project Featured on Aug 14, 2016
Project of the Day on Aug 14, 2016
Firm
Type
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2013
SIZE
5000 sqft - 10,000 sqft
Composition:
First Floor
Basic composition of TORUS is a
bilayer structure consisted of a white, half-amorphous box floating on the
lower layer softly surrounded by glass and perforated aluminum panels.
The transparency and the
openness of this layer is a natural solution for the functional requirement to
expose the presence of the salon to prospective customers and other passer-bys,
as well as to open up the ground outside the shop area surrounded by the curved
perforated partitions as "dog-run" field where dogs can freely run
around.
The apparently free line of the
curved wall is actually based on our careful recognition of what we call the "welcoming
zones", i.e., the pocket areas required to open up to the urban context
outside the building site. The cutting-outs of such zones as parking, entrance
and spaces for outdoor equipment have resulted in the irregular curve of the
wall as the output of such operations.
Composition: Second and Third Floors
The upper unit containing two
floors within presents a sharp contrast to the open, transparent lower layer
with its weighty, massive appearance almost like a heavily-armed tank defending
the rather indoorsy life of the client family. With a closer look, the
surface of the wall shows a texture similar to a handmade pottery instead of
that of a flat, uniform industrial product.
Texture: Exterior Wall
The pottery-like texture is the
result of painstaking manual operation of repeatedly applying and spreading the
waterproof material onto the wall. Beside such a consideration to the
close-up texture, the exterior of this second layer also involves our sensitivity
to the longer-distance outlook of the building, which is realized by an
operation of transcribing the sky onto
the wall.
The transcription process is as
following: first, we took a picture of the sky right above the site on the day
of framework completion (PHASE 1); the picture was then abstracted into a gray-scale
gradation graphic (PHASE 2), which we applied as the contour map of the
undulating surface by carefully duplicating it on the four sides of the wall;
finally, we covered the surface with finishing mortar while controlling its
thickness (varied from 0 to 30mm) based on the contour lines – and thus emerged
the ambiguous cloudy sky texture.
The finished wall naturally
takes on a feature of the sky with wispy clouds, as shown in the pictures
below.
The treatment of the exterior
wall described above has allowed us to produce quirky and blurry edges on the
corners of the floating box, which is obviously different from the familiar
sight of sharp edges of building corners fashioned with usual industrial
materials – and thus make this architecture stand out in the ordinary
cityscape.
On a cloudy day, the floating
mass looks as if it blends in with the sky, while its edges lose their
individual materiality as they melt into the gradational clouds in the
background. TORUS is probably a rare architecture that looks much better under
clouds than clear sky.
Interior composition: Internal Void (through second and third floors)
Let us move up into the massive
floating box, which appears extremely exclusive of the surrounding urban
context.
Beside the entrance door is a
small pocket space: although it is still an open-air space, it somehow bears an
indoor atmosphere due to the careful treatment of proportions and openings.
Right inside the entrance door
is a huge void within the massive box.
This is the particular
atmosphere inside TORUS, a doughnut-like geometry with one big opening within.
While the outlook of the building implies ultimate closure, it embraces a
surprisingly voluminous space or “The
Outside” almost mistakable for a street or a patio – which is actually a
glass-covered interior void.
Interior Texture: Internal Void
The prior factor of this “outside effect” is obviously the
gigantic top light on the roof, but there is another, rather obscure one: the
rugged interior wall finish.
The material itself is actually
an ordinary, cheap plywood panel available in any hardware store in Japan. To
give the particular tactile quality to this daily material, we cut the panels
into narrow boards of 200mm width each and then manually removed the soft parts
from each and every board to let the hard grains stand out on the surface. With
the finishing white paint (which needed a special preparation to evenly paint
over the water-absorbing and non-absorbing portions of the surface), the
ordinary material has been turned into a unique finishing material like this.
This extremely labor- and
time-consuming work was all done by our staff and the students of the private
school led by the chief architect Norisada Maeda, and it took about two months
to finish all the boards necessary to fill up the interior wall of the building
(it is unimaginable how much it would have costed if the work has been
committed to professional carpenters and the painters…).
The resulted difference may
appear rather slight and obscure from a distance, but a closer look will show
the rough, but also tasteful texture of the artificially aged wall as shown in
the picture below.
General-purpose industrial
materials like plywood panels usually require – or even boast of – ultimate
evenness of their qualities, although they can never get rid of slight
differences in, for example, their wood grains. It echoes with the contemporary
consumers’ taste for orderly outlook of such evenly processed materials. We
consider, however, such myopic taste for apparent cleanliness and/or
orderliness as one of the big reasons for the qualitative poverty of today’s
architecture.
Even the plywood boards have
individual characteristics, like each and every human individual has different
face and life history. The artificial aging treatment to expose the individual
“wood” nature within each and every industrially-processed plywood is a sort of
a manifestation of our homage to the wooden materials that make up the actual
architectural space.
Summary
As described above, the
particular focus in TORUS can be summarized as following: clear-cut
segmentation of lower and upper layers; “cutting-outs” of spaces from the
surrounding urban context; unique treatment of inside/outside; invention of new
texture treatment. TORUS has come to
life with these considerations blended in together to realize the true richness
of a residential space in the given context.
First Floor
Basic composition of TORUS is a
bilayer structure consisted of a white, half-amorphous box floating on the
lower layer softly surrounded by glass and perforated aluminum panels.
The transparency and the
openness of this layer is a natural solution for the functional requirement to
expose the presence of the salon to prospective customers and other passer-bys,
as well as to open up the ground outside the shop area surrounded by the curved
perforated partitions as "dog-run" field where dogs can freely run
around.
The apparently free line of the
curved wall is actually based on our careful recognition of what we call the "welcoming
zones", i.e., the pocket areas required to open up to the urban context
outside the building site. The cutting-outs of such zones as parking, entrance
and spaces for outdoor equipment have resulted in the irregular curve of the
wall as the output of such operations.
Composition: Second and Third Floors
The upper unit containing two
floors within presents a sharp contrast to the open, transparent lower layer
with its weighty, massive appearance almost like a heavily-armed tank defending
the rather indoorsy life of the client family. With a closer look, the
surface of the wall shows a texture similar to a handmade pottery instead of
that of a flat, uniform industrial product.
Texture: Exterior Wall
The pottery-like texture is the
result of painstaking manual operation of repeatedly applying and spreading the
waterproof material onto the wall. Beside such a consideration to the
close-up texture, the exterior of this second layer also involves our sensitivity
to the longer-distance outlook of the building, which is realized by an
operation of transcribing the sky onto
the wall.
The transcription process is as
following: first, we took a picture of the sky right above the site on the day
of framework completion (PHASE 1); the picture was then abstracted into a gray-scale
gradation graphic (PHASE 2), which we applied as the contour map of the
undulating surface by carefully duplicating it on the four sides of the wall;
finally, we covered the surface with finishing mortar while controlling its
thickness (varied from 0 to 30mm) based on the contour lines – and thus emerged
the ambiguous cloudy sky texture.
The finished wall naturally
takes on a feature of the sky with wispy clouds, as shown in the pictures
below.
The treatment of the exterior
wall described above has allowed us to produce quirky and blurry edges on the
corners of the floating box, which is obviously different from the familiar
sight of sharp edges of building corners fashioned with usual industrial
materials – and thus make this architecture stand out in the ordinary
cityscape.
On a cloudy day, the floating
mass looks as if it blends in with the sky, while its edges lose their
individual materiality as they melt into the gradational clouds in the
background. TORUS is probably a rare architecture that looks much better under
clouds than clear sky.
Interior composition: Internal Void (through second and third floors)
Let us move up into the massive
floating box, which appears extremely exclusive of the surrounding urban
context.
Beside the entrance door is a
small pocket space: although it is still an open-air space, it somehow bears an
indoor atmosphere due to the careful treatment of proportions and openings.
Right inside the entrance door
is a huge void within the massive box.
This is the particular
atmosphere inside TORUS, a doughnut-like geometry with one big opening within.
While the outlook of the building implies ultimate closure, it embraces a
surprisingly voluminous space or “The
Outside” almost mistakable for a street or a patio – which is actually a
glass-covered interior void.
Interior Texture: Internal Void
The prior factor of this “outside effect” is obviously the
gigantic top light on the roof, but there is another, rather obscure one: the
rugged interior wall finish.
The material itself is actually
an ordinary, cheap plywood panel available in any hardware store in Japan. To
give the particular tactile quality to this daily material, we cut the panels
into narrow boards of 200mm width each and then manually removed the soft parts
from each and every board to let the hard grains stand out on the surface. With
the finishing white paint (which needed a special preparation to evenly paint
over the water-absorbing and non-absorbing portions of the surface), the
ordinary material has been turned into a unique finishing material like this.
This extremely labor- and
time-consuming work was all done by our staff and the students of the private
school led by the chief architect Norisada Maeda, and it took about two months
to finish all the boards necessary to fill up the interior wall of the building
(it is unimaginable how much it would have costed if the work has been
committed to professional carpenters and the painters…).
The resulted difference may
appear rather slight and obscure from a distance, but a closer look will show
the rough, but also tasteful texture of the artificially aged wall as shown in
the picture below.
General-purpose industrial
materials like plywood panels usually require – or even boast of – ultimate
evenness of their qualities, although they can never get rid of slight
differences in, for example, their wood grains. It echoes with the contemporary
consumers’ taste for orderly outlook of such evenly processed materials. We
consider, however, such myopic taste for apparent cleanliness and/or
orderliness as one of the big reasons for the qualitative poverty of today’s
architecture.
Even the plywood boards have
individual characteristics, like each and every human individual has different
face and life history. The artificial aging treatment to expose the individual
“wood” nature within each and every industrially-processed plywood is a sort of
a manifestation of our homage to the wooden materials that make up the actual
architectural space.
Summary
As described above, the
particular focus in TORUS can be summarized as following: clear-cut
segmentation of lower and upper layers; “cutting-outs” of spaces from the
surrounding urban context; unique treatment of inside/outside; invention of new
texture treatment. TORUS has come to
life with these considerations blended in together to realize the true richness
of a residential space in the given context.
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