The Eye

Japanese Architects Imagine How Our Future Houses Will Look

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The House With Refrigerator Access From Outside was designed by Fumie Shibata in collaboration with delivery service company Yamato Holdings.

House Vision

A house with a refrigerator accessible from the outside for grocery deliveries, a future Airbnb rental house with a community space on the ground floor, and a house for upscale global nomads are some of the projects at House Vision Tokyo 2016, an event curated by Muji creative director Kenya Hara in which 12 leading Japanese architects use the home as a point of departure for designing solutions for the future of housing in Japan.

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The refrigerator compartments can also be used to secure package deliveries.

 

House Vision

The theme of the second installment of the event, which was last held in 2013, is “Co-Dividual: Split and Connect/Separate and Come Together.” The theme “addresses the question of how we can bring together and re-connect individuals, urban and rural areas, and fragmented technologies,” the organizers said in a project description.

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Architect Go Hasegawa designed a house in collaboration with Airbnb that uses local cedar from Yoshino that “aims to build new relationships with the area,” with a free first floor community space and a gable-roofed loft on the second floor that will be transported to Yoshino and rented on Airbnb, where paying guests will be able to interact with locals.

House Vision

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Interior view of the shared space on the ground floor.

House Vision

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Future Airbnb rental.

House Vision

“Japan faces significant issues with this topic, as a country struggling with economic stagnation, a decreasing population, an aging society, disasters striking one after another, and increasing friction in interpersonal communication,” they added in a press release. “That is precisely why Japan is the ideal place to examine the form of the house from many different perspectives, exploring specific survival strategies with the potential to show how we will live in the future.”

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Japanese department store Isetan Mitsukoshi collaborated with architects Makoto Tanijiri and Ai Yoshida to design a house for upscale global nomads.

House Vision

Below are some highlights, and you can check out all 12 housing projects featured in the event, which opened Saturday and runs until Aug. 28, here.

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Toppan Printing’s Woodgrain House looks like a gigantic block of Japanese cedar.

House Vision

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Using high-tech printing technology, the house is made of textured laminates that rival natural lumber.

House Vision

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Architect Shigeru Ban’s Open House With Condensed Core is a collaboration with Japanese building manufacturer Lixil.

House Vision

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Lixil’s  “Life Core” system integrates bathroom and kitchen areas by clustering plumbing for water supply and wastewater removal overhead instead of under the floor, enabling a greater flexibility of layout.

House Vision

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Lixil’s technology allows heavy glass to easily slide and rotate 90 degrees, allowing homes to have wide openings to the outdoors.

House Vision

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Architect Sou Fujimoto came up with the Rental Space Tower for residential leasing and management company Daito Trust Construction that is a nod to the trend for co-living spaces that feature small private quarters and privilege spacious shared kitchens, bathrooms, theater rooms, and gardens.

House Vision

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The design eliminates traditional apartment building corridors to maximize and open up the space.

 

House Vision

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TOTO/YKK AP showrooms and architect Jun Igarashi, along with furniture designer Taiji Fujimori, created the Inside-Out/Furniture-Room house.

House Vision

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In the playful design, windows become deep openings that lead to unfamiliar spaces that hover between inside and out.

 

House Vision

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One of the blown out window rooms.

House Vision