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Sasame Workshop
Sasame Workshop
Saitama, Japan
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Sasame Workshop
Saitama, Japan
Firm
Type
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2024
SIZE
3000 sqft - 5000 sqft
BUDGET
$1M - 5M
Seeing and Appearing
The scenery that softly drifts around the real objects grasped by intentional consciousness often returns more vividly in memory or dreams than the object itself. This project gives form to that pre-reflective and peripheral mode of vision which precedes focal attention within an industrial district. Through a balcony enclosed by varied polycarbonate panels and plantings, landscapes calibrated at different degrees of perceptual resolution emerge, in a delicate resonance with the surrounding factories.
Memory and Landscape
When absorbed in work or conversation, do we truly notice the placement of furniture or the view from the window? Often, on nights after significant events, it is the seemingly negligible background that returns most insistently in dreams. These ambient surroundings—hazy and indeterminate—appear to harbor an intensity irreducible to the clear figures confronted by conscious perception.
In southwestern Toda City, on the left bank of the Arakawa River, the client—a local HVAC contractor—faced both a deteriorating office and an inefficient workspace. A split-level configuration reduced overall height and volume while shaping a sectional form that articulates the continuity of sight, air, and light across vertically displaced fields. Movable transparent partitions along the internal stair mediate between thermal conditions and bodily comfort; when opened or closed, they reduce HVAC loads while allowing the interior landscape to shift in appearance rather than in fixed image.
Avoiding Excessive Resolution
The second-floor workspace opens onto a balcony wrapped in planting, filtering southwestern sunlight and forming a buffer zone against neighboring factories. Like the terrace’s vegetation and the distant greenery, the industrial scenery and the mechanical hum are received on equal phenomenological terms.
Exterior walls and interior partitions employ polycarbonate panels and glass of differing specifications, each responding to distinct requirements of wind resistance and visibility. Plantings, weathered siding, the river embankment, rusted corrugated rooftops, and the staggered interiors are mutually mediated rather than hierarchically ordered, giving rise to landscapes that appear at varying degrees of clarity. The noise of nearby factories functions as a basso continuo, structurally underpinning the field of appearances.
Perceived through peripheral vision, this relaxed and porous landscape opens a margin in which imagination may descend, allowing experience to drift between memory and the present, between what is seen and what quietly comes into view.
“Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space, making us mere spectators.”
— Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
The scenery that softly drifts around the real objects grasped by intentional consciousness often returns more vividly in memory or dreams than the object itself. This project gives form to that pre-reflective and peripheral mode of vision which precedes focal attention within an industrial district. Through a balcony enclosed by varied polycarbonate panels and plantings, landscapes calibrated at different degrees of perceptual resolution emerge, in a delicate resonance with the surrounding factories.
Memory and Landscape
When absorbed in work or conversation, do we truly notice the placement of furniture or the view from the window? Often, on nights after significant events, it is the seemingly negligible background that returns most insistently in dreams. These ambient surroundings—hazy and indeterminate—appear to harbor an intensity irreducible to the clear figures confronted by conscious perception.
In southwestern Toda City, on the left bank of the Arakawa River, the client—a local HVAC contractor—faced both a deteriorating office and an inefficient workspace. A split-level configuration reduced overall height and volume while shaping a sectional form that articulates the continuity of sight, air, and light across vertically displaced fields. Movable transparent partitions along the internal stair mediate between thermal conditions and bodily comfort; when opened or closed, they reduce HVAC loads while allowing the interior landscape to shift in appearance rather than in fixed image.
Avoiding Excessive Resolution
The second-floor workspace opens onto a balcony wrapped in planting, filtering southwestern sunlight and forming a buffer zone against neighboring factories. Like the terrace’s vegetation and the distant greenery, the industrial scenery and the mechanical hum are received on equal phenomenological terms.
Exterior walls and interior partitions employ polycarbonate panels and glass of differing specifications, each responding to distinct requirements of wind resistance and visibility. Plantings, weathered siding, the river embankment, rusted corrugated rooftops, and the staggered interiors are mutually mediated rather than hierarchically ordered, giving rise to landscapes that appear at varying degrees of clarity. The noise of nearby factories functions as a basso continuo, structurally underpinning the field of appearances.
Perceived through peripheral vision, this relaxed and porous landscape opens a margin in which imagination may descend, allowing experience to drift between memory and the present, between what is seen and what quietly comes into view.
“Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space, making us mere spectators.”
— Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
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