© Iwan Baan . Published on July 12, 2012.

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House standing within a residential district in central Tokyo.

© Iwan Baan . Published on July 12, 2012.

To dwell in a house, amongst the dense urbanity of small houses and structures can be associated to living within a tree. Tree has many branches, all being a setting for a place, and a source of activities of diverse scales.

© Iwan Baan . Published on July 12, 2012.

The intriguing point of a tree is that these places are not hermetically isolated but are connected to one another in its unique relativity. To hear one’s voice from across and above, hopping over to another branch, a discussion taking place across branches by members from separate branches. These are some of the moments of richness encountered through such spatially dense living.

© Iwan Baan . Published on July 12, 2012.

By stratifying floor plates almost furniture-like in scale, throughout the space, this house proposes living quarters orchestrated by its spatio-temporal relativity with one another, akin to a tree. The house can be considered a large single-room, and, if each floor is understood as rooms, it can equally be said that the house is a mansion of multifarious rooms. A unity of separation and coherence.

© Iwan Baan . Published on July 12, 2012.

Elements from furniture scales come together to collectively form scale of rooms, and further unto those of dwellings, of which renders the city.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects . Published on July 12, 2012.

The steps between the plates at times will become seating and desks, at times as a device segmenting a territory, and at times each akin to leaves of the foliage filtering light down into the space.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects . Published on July 12, 2012.

Providing intimacy for when two individuals chooses to be close to one another, or for a place afar still sharing each other’s being. For when accommodating a group of guests, the distribution of people across the entire house will form a platform for a network type communication in space.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects . Published on July 12, 2012.

The white steel-frame structure itself shares no resemblance to a tree.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects . Published on July 12, 2012.

Yet the life lived and the moments experienced in this space is a contemporary adaptation of the richness once experienced by the ancient predecessors from the time when they inhabited trees. Such is an existence between city, architecture, furniture and the body, and is equally between nature and artificiality.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects . Published on July 12, 2012.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects . Published on July 12, 2012.