Sasaki-Gishi Prosthetic & Orthotic Services, Inc., Tokyo, Japan

Related people

Robert Livesey (was created by)
Hitoshi Abe (architect)

Description

"This project is an office and factory for the production of prostheses, in a building contained by a typical flagpole-shaped site. Our aim was to make a single space with a soft boundary that would allow people to work together in this place. The building is organized around a 6m x 6m x 6m glass box floating in midair, located in the center of a space directly extruded from the shape of the site. All sightlines are focused on an open interior courtyard arranged between the various rooms, ensuring spatial continuity and allowing the people working here to feel that they are sharing a single space. The walls were built tracing the site boundaries, while following the building height restrictions and achieving the maximum floor area. The structure has no interior columns so as to make a free and flexible space inside. The exterior structural walls comprise precast concrete panels that are stacked up and then post-stressed, giving the panels and the openings a uniform checkerboard arrangement. Resulting from the arrangement of openings, this checkered pattern controls views of the disordered surroundings, making a boundary that softly separates this place from the outside." --http://www.a-slash.jp/main.html

---