From the Archive: Ryue Nishizawa’s Groundbreaking Tokyo Apartment Complex
Designers around the world embraced the prefab compound’s radical simplicity—featured on the cover of our December/January 2007 issue—which charted a new way forward for 21st-century minimalism.
As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s December/January 2007 issue.
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.
Photo: Dean Kaufman
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.
Photo: Dean Kaufman
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All but one of the residents work in the design field, giving the place the air of a college campus. Moriyama calls all the residents "family."
Photo: Dean Kaufman
As visiting architect Junko Ishii puts it, "Outside the compound, our awareness is different. Within, we can concentrate on our own realm. This is a pure white space."
Photo: Dean Kaufman
See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.
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