fantastic structure

Forum 246 as seen from Odakyu-line. A fantastic structure is visible in the facade.

curtain wall house

Curtain Wall House, Shigeru Ban, 1995. On windy winter day.

A curtain wall is an outer covering of a building in which the outer walls are non-structural, but merely keep out the weather. - Wikipedia.

mies invented the glass curtain wall, but I just used a curtain. Shigeru Ban - Designboom

What is notable is the tree missing in the old photos. If must affect the second floor deck space deeply in summer. Also the four cars crammed into the plot.

More information with plans from a Moma exhibition. Shigeru Ban Architects website about the project here.

Edo Tokyo Museum

Edo Tokyo Museum - Kiyonori Kikutake - 1993. The grand exhibition hall lifted from a giant podium on four giant legs which provides vertical access. The main access is through a disturbing red escalator.

Just the building itself, which looks like it has been spirited from the set of Star Wars, is a wonder. - Lonely Planet Japan

Another bubble project this time the city museum, which covers the history and development from Edo to Tokyo with a story ending somewhere around the Olympics gives a certain insight into the city.
As many bubble projects the cost of this museum was big, and a better end result could surely have been delivered  for the same amount of money. But there still is something charmingly utopian over this whole project. Sadly the podium, the vast outdoor space underneath the museum seems sadly under used. The would be a wonderful setting for a park project.
The architect behind the museum Kikutake is mostly famous for Sky House, metabolism and his various marine city schemes. Sadly the 1994 Tokyo Sofitel, close to Ueno, telling the this story is no longer.
He also worked with the group behind various hyper building schemes.

Access: JR Sobu-line Ryogoku or TOEI Oedo-line
Other works: Sky House

a slim house

Another example of typology. Here a slim and high house next to two wider houses. Random placement of smaller windows. The plot behind the house belong to a small danchi like building with a large garden.

Air condition units around the house. One for every space or in this case floor. Note the cable connecting the 3rd floor with the outdoor unit on the second floor.

a small blue house

From a typological view this is an typical Tokyo house, however the colour sets it apart. Everything else is within the borders of normality; roof shape, window placement, plants along the wall, shop combined with house, signage, vending machine on corner and size.  

reuse

An computer supports a plant.

An not so environmentally friendly way to recycle a computer.

happy industrial postmodernism

Miyasaka Community Hall, Masamitsu Nozawa Building Workshop, 1990. Gable shapes lifted by truss.

new and old

The plaza in front of an office development in  a block in Akihabara. The office tower owns a large but not complete part of the block. Some older, small scale houses sit along the edge of the block. The intersection between properties surely must mean something.

gardens

Note that the steps in the gap between the house. One house has complete concrete filling, the other offers a softer surface with steps on top of gravel.
Look below for a series of gardens in a dense pocket of streets on the border of Setagaya-ku and Shibuya-ku. This series of pictures started as an idea that (almost) every utopian megastructure could be found represented in a street garden, I abandoned the project, not because it is false but because is trivially true. 
For one better example street garden see Yet Another Street Garden.

4 ways to use parking space

This type of almost identical buildings arise on larger (for small values of large) plot developed into a series of independent houses. 4 different uses of the space provided.