Ota City, Japan - Sasaki Architecture

The music hall & housing project displays an intense integration of intentional community in tandem with micro housing. The firm was tasked to design a condition where residents can gather, express their creativity, and study music in a variety of spaces. To accomplish this Sasaki utilized micro units to allow space for the concert hall and practice rooms.

Use: intentional community, communal focus, efficiency apartment organization

Minato City, Japan - IHRMK

A big house. That is the concept that drives the Hatsuse Mita apartments. The owners needed a place to live as their family changed over the years that would also function as rental space. To do this each unit has a unique floor plan, capable of serving the owner’s family or being sectioned off as a rental unit. This also means that private and communal zones are neither closed off or open, they make up the edge pieces of the property and allow for further flexibility of spaces without sacrificing privacy.

Use: flexible spaces, meguri-doma (covered stairwell/common corridor)

Toyonaka, Japan - Takenaka Corp

The dormitory was commissioned by the Takenaka Corporation as a means of providing dorm-style housing to single employees. Each unit consists of two bedrooms each with a private bathroom while sharing a kitchen and living space. This creates a stepped progression of privacy, with the shared circulation in the courtyard being the most public, shared patio spaces between units, kitchens, then the most private zone the bedroom.

Use: dorm style efficiency apartment, privacy gradient

Fukuyama, Japan - Mount Fuji Architects Studio

Seto looked to solve two problems: corporate housing for local shipyard workers and a lack of a public gathering space. The form takes inspiration from the structural framework of a ship hull: a ‘control cabin’ to the back, a public pavilion, and a central circulatory system with private rooms to either side.

Use: artistic representation, subtle integration of sustainability strategies

Yokohama, Japan - KEY OPERATIONS INC.

So called for the blade-like concrete fins of the facade, the Kannai Blade Residence consists of ninety four privately owned studio apartments, ranging from 22m2 to 47m2. What the locals call ‘one-room-mansions’ geared towards singles or young couples without children. The structure is hyper-expressed in the facade, the concrete floor slab emphasized, broken up by the paper-thin concrete fins. “By using enmeshed carbon cables instead of the usual steel rods to reinforce concrete and by adding polypropylene fiber to strengthen the mixture, the panels can be made as thin as 40mm, as tall as 5 meters, and incredibly still be load-bearing.”

Use: lighting strategies, focus on individuals early in career/life, innovative materials

Buenos Aries, Argentina - Arqtipo

Houses ten units, the facade makes use of only one material: the Bricko brick from Corblock. With the adjacent sites planned for development only two facades were deemed usable, on these balconies extending beyond the setbacks. Such a choice is simultaneously limiting and freeing, being limited to one material forces designers to explore the potential every aspect of that singular element has at its disposal.

Use: intense understanding of material opportunities

Sant Boi de Llobregat, Spain - Estudio Herroros + MIM-A

A mix of social and free-market housing, combined with the requirements of efficiency meant that the site needed to make use of the entirety of its buildable volume. One such way is by creating micro communities, these communities are made up of three units, sharing circulation organized around the interior courtyards.

Use: unit organization, material use

Châlons-En-Champagne, France - Philippe Gilbert Architecte

The typology of the length is interesting for its triple orientation and its profile. On this project, the council preferred to offer residents comfort through almost semi-individual dwellings. Each plot is positioned so as to have a distance from existing buildings, other plots, and public spaces.

Use: creating a neighborhood through architecture

Aarhus, Denmark - BIG

Developed as a contribution to the master plan of Nye, Sneglehusene is described as a porous wall comprising six buildings that lead occupants towards a central pond. The buildings are organized using a checkered facade pattern with modules of 2.5m and 3.5m height.

Use: creating community, integrating local nature, water recycling

Paris, France - TCAU

This articulation territory stages the new district in a particular morphology defined by the urban plan of Atelier Lion, of Macro-lots crossed by passages, “park-pocket” and landscape-gardens and which are anchored on a real “geography” of unevenness. The project pays homage to the urban facades of Paris, by re-involving the Métiers d’Art in the architectural creation of the shows, in a contemporary vision of the city, thus reviving the tradition of Parisian buildings, up to the beginning of the 20th century.

Use: micro units, architectonic conditions, roof garden generation