Tokyo-based architectural practice Shingo Masuda + Katsuhisa Otsubo have transformed an ordinary two-story Tokyo building into a striking loft-like dwelling via an unusual architectural element: a steel-and-glass grid of windows that entirely fronts the structure like a gate.
The 2014 project, which garnered the young firm a prestigious Emerging Architecture Award by The Architectural Review, was undertaken to meet the requirements of a photographer eager to turn a forgettable suburban building that previously housed three separate apartments into an open-plan interior space from which to realize his creative projects. While the architects gutted and re-composed the interior into an austere industrial volume befitting the demands of a sophisticated, visually-driven client, it’s the building’s exterior treatment that proves transformative.
Masuda and Otsubo’s bespoke Boundary Window, which exceeds both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the edifice, not only bestows on the building a brand new skin, but does so with one that, though firmly bolted to the ground, creates a discernible separation between old and new—much as a picture frame does with a work of art. Boundary Window’s glassy curtain slides open at numerous points on each of the two floors, rises above the building to form an enclosed terrace, and, most intriguingly, makes visible through its expanse the building’s original dimensions and window openings. That’s quite a curtain call for the architects, we’d say.
