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Ushigome Yanagicho Residential Building
Ushigome Yanagicho Residential Building
Tokyo, Japan
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Other Projects by team raw row
Ushigome Yanagicho Residential Building
Tokyo, Japan
Firm
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2025
SIZE
3000 sqft - 5000 sqft
Located in a quiet residential neighborhood with convenient access to central Tokyo, this multi-family housing project reconsiders urban living within one of the city's most densely built environments. Detached houses, apartment buildings, temples, and cemeteries coexist throughout the neighborhood, creating a distinctive urban fabric inhabited by long-term residents, young professionals, and families alike.
Rather than repeating identical apartments, the project proposes a residential building that accommodates diverse ways of living. Each dwelling offers a different relationship to light, privacy, views, and outdoor space, creating a layered living environment that resembles the diversity of the surrounding city.
The site's dense context presented several challenges. Narrow streets and limited distances between neighboring buildings often result in compromised daylight, restricted views, and a lack of privacy. Instead of resisting these conditions, the design transforms them into opportunities to generate spatial richness.
Economic and planning requirements also shaped the building's form. Maximizing the allowable floor area while minimizing construction costs required an efficient reinforced concrete structure with a compact building volume. Compliance with setback and shadow regulations led to a four-story building, kept below 10 meters in height and stepped back progressively toward the north. This terraced configuration creates distinct spatial conditions on every floor while reducing the building's visual impact on its surroundings.
Because openings could not be freely positioned, windows are concentrated on the north, where greater separation from neighboring buildings is available, and on the east, where the street provides longer views. Ground-floor apartments extend into the basement, creating generous depth within a compact footprint. Double-height voids bring daylight into the lower level and establish calm living spaces despite the dense urban setting. On the upper floors, maisonette apartments span the third and fourth levels, introducing vertical openness and views toward the sky. Together, these dwelling types provide a wide range of spatial experiences within a relatively compact building.
A key architectural strategy is the subtle displacement of walls and openings. Rather than aligning directly with adjacent buildings, they are gently staggered to create diagonal views, improve ventilation, and reduce visual confrontation. These small shifts generate unexpected spatial depth, allowing light, air, and sightlines to flow through the building while softening the sense of enclosure characteristic of dense urban neighborhoods.
This approach is reinforced by the use of a reinforced concrete wall structure. Rather than functioning solely as a structural system, the walls define the identity of each dwelling while maximizing usable living space within the limited building volume.
The building's staggered walls and stepped massing express the diversity of its interior on the exterior. Instead of appearing as a single concrete volume, it reads as a layered composition of individual homes, reducing its perceived scale while introducing a new rhythm to the surrounding streetscape.
Homes extending into the ground, opening toward the street, and reaching toward the sky coexist within a single architectural form. By embracing, rather than overcoming, the constraints of a dense urban site, the project proposes a new model of collective housing in which urban limitations become the source of spatial diversity and richer everyday living.
Rather than repeating identical apartments, the project proposes a residential building that accommodates diverse ways of living. Each dwelling offers a different relationship to light, privacy, views, and outdoor space, creating a layered living environment that resembles the diversity of the surrounding city.
The site's dense context presented several challenges. Narrow streets and limited distances between neighboring buildings often result in compromised daylight, restricted views, and a lack of privacy. Instead of resisting these conditions, the design transforms them into opportunities to generate spatial richness.
Economic and planning requirements also shaped the building's form. Maximizing the allowable floor area while minimizing construction costs required an efficient reinforced concrete structure with a compact building volume. Compliance with setback and shadow regulations led to a four-story building, kept below 10 meters in height and stepped back progressively toward the north. This terraced configuration creates distinct spatial conditions on every floor while reducing the building's visual impact on its surroundings.
Because openings could not be freely positioned, windows are concentrated on the north, where greater separation from neighboring buildings is available, and on the east, where the street provides longer views. Ground-floor apartments extend into the basement, creating generous depth within a compact footprint. Double-height voids bring daylight into the lower level and establish calm living spaces despite the dense urban setting. On the upper floors, maisonette apartments span the third and fourth levels, introducing vertical openness and views toward the sky. Together, these dwelling types provide a wide range of spatial experiences within a relatively compact building.
A key architectural strategy is the subtle displacement of walls and openings. Rather than aligning directly with adjacent buildings, they are gently staggered to create diagonal views, improve ventilation, and reduce visual confrontation. These small shifts generate unexpected spatial depth, allowing light, air, and sightlines to flow through the building while softening the sense of enclosure characteristic of dense urban neighborhoods.
This approach is reinforced by the use of a reinforced concrete wall structure. Rather than functioning solely as a structural system, the walls define the identity of each dwelling while maximizing usable living space within the limited building volume.
The building's staggered walls and stepped massing express the diversity of its interior on the exterior. Instead of appearing as a single concrete volume, it reads as a layered composition of individual homes, reducing its perceived scale while introducing a new rhythm to the surrounding streetscape.
Homes extending into the ground, opening toward the street, and reaching toward the sky coexist within a single architectural form. By embracing, rather than overcoming, the constraints of a dense urban site, the project proposes a new model of collective housing in which urban limitations become the source of spatial diversity and richer everyday living.
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