东京住宅区精致总部大楼

Firm： Satoshi Okada architects

Type： Commercial › Office

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2018

Small, comfortably homelike offices are becoming an emerging typology to counteract the alienation of long working hours in huge headquarter complexes.

So far many poor office buildings – in Japanese jargon pencil buildings- hosted employees of medium to small size companies.

Y HEADQUARTERS BUILDING sets itself apart from this category because of few key reasons:

1. it belongs to a small company catering for high quality services: it therefore requires multiple individual spaces where each worker may concentrate;

2. on the other hand it requires transparency and overall permeability to encourage human relations;

This refined headquarter hosts 15 employees and is located in a residential district of downtown Tokyo. It is a composition of two volumes facing each other across a sunken garden. The block on the right hand side faces a street junction and is used as an interface with the public; the one on the left contains the workstations. The two volumes overlook onto a central void through entirely glazed facades; this helps remarkably to set a visual communication between employees and customers and visitors.

Photo credit: Satoshi Shigeta