2 family residence | House in Ogikubo | Ogikubo, Tokyo, Japan | Satoshi Okada Architects

The house is located in Ogikubo, one of the most highly congested districts with residences in Tokyo, where the urban fabric is rather chaotic with capillary alleys, a remainder of postwar conditions.
The housing lots are naturally irregular and relatively small; therefore once outsiders get into the maze, they invariably lose their ways out from it.
The site of a flag shaped faces upon two streets; one is a narrow public road to the south, the other is a private path to the west, below which a tiny waterway runs even today.
On the north, there is a neighbor’s garden with plenty of beautiful greens beyond a fence. The client is of two families, two elders and their daughter’s family.
They want to live together in two different houses in a single site.
The way of living becomes popular in Japan today, mainly because the property is still expensive for the younger generation.
For these years, I had thought that it is an interesting social phenomenon, and I finally reached a proposition, “independence in dependence,” after struggling to consider how I could reflect it on architecture.....more