On a double suburban lot in Tokyo, the Office of Ryue Nishizawa built a neighborhood-scaled, flexible-format minimalist steel prefab compound for Yasuo Moriyama—a very private individual with a powerful social bent—and six rental tenants. Every room is its own building—even Moriyama’s bath is a freestanding box. Here, tradition and innovation interweave to create a new kind of community.
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Comments
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This, I think, is the most interesting project I've seen in the pages of Dwell so far. Strikingly beautiful, but also innovative and complex. A compound like this could easily fund itself with rent, and seems like a shockingly smart model for anyone in an urban area with enough for a down payment and an architect friend.
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Yeah! Good job, Ryue! Another box. Well done. You even threw in the kazuyo Sejima chair in the foreground for good promotional measure. The client must be a very private person to be photographed for this magazine.
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Beautiful indeed, I would love something akin to this for my family as we are all now grown, even the children. Your comments about 'the compound' make it sound a bit frightening, though thankfully I am confident that this is only in the text. As to the new format here and throughout: I do not like to wrestle with non-responsive buttons and quickly flickering slide-shows; I prefer to be the one to set the pace for each scene, for not each image makes me want to sit with it exactly the same amount of time. I believe the robotic forward motion of images should be the option and the self propelled visuals to be the given. Although many who tease me for my strong love of what they consider to be sterile architecture - that is perceived much in Japan's and what we are primarily shown -austere, white and just ever so - I don't find them disagreeing with what I find here to be a much more sterile and distant Dwell. I used to perceive a great deal of warmth from Dwell, having read your magazine since it's inception and I find that warmth draining away. I will still go to my locally owned magazine shop and purchase Dwell with my other 14 favorites, but I find more and more of a disconnect growing between my usual internet 'complimentary websites' and the streets that I walk down each day / the places I travel to and the people I speak with. Here, I feel like I walk through a beautiful city, I glory at the architecture, design and - then I realize I no longer feel a breeze on my face or hear a bird singing. Then I realize I don't hear trees groaning. There is no temperature. I hope you realize this comment is made with a tinge of sadness from an old friend - not acerbic lashing as we see all over the internet like ugly spits of spray paint- urban tags, lesser than graffiti by far. Thanks for reading.
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This space is so clean and serene. Definitely promotes relaxation.
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Hmm. LB, this was on the cover of Dwell almost 2.5 years ago; if you're just now realizing it, maybe you haven't been as attentive to Dwell's needs as you should have been. Maybe it's not Dwell who's changed, but you. Maybe it's best for you two to go your separate ways. As for the Moriyama House, Momus tracked it down via Google Maps two years ago and visited. There was a barbecue and a gnome in the courtyard, and most all the windows were covered in sheets, presumably because of the constants stream of gawking foreign architecture pilgrims.
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whoops, silly me for thinking I could include a URL on the web. http://imomus.livejournal.com/289220.html
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