Urbanprem Minami Aoyama building was constructed by Yuko Nagayama & Associates in Tokyo, Japan. Constructed in 2012, the building has an extraordinary façade. Text description provided by the architects. This tenant building is in the residential neighborhood facing the narrow street from one block away from Aoyama Ave, by contrast to a number of tall buildings along the way. Situated in this gap between these two scales, we aim to stand the one in a way that doesn’t belong to both of these scales.
The shape of the building is fairly bent skywards, like a stomach being stuck out forward, which does not allow people to tell how many stories it has in looking up the building from the street. The design of two slit patterned windows that opens on each level also makes unclear the scale. Sunlight reflected on the curved outer wall like gradation, while inside of the room it streams in through the windows. Based on the concept of “abstraction “, we design a new way of the encounter between architecture and people.
