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.

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.

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.”

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.”

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

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