Designs of the time

Airbnb is the only non-Japanese participant and worked with architect Go Hasegawa on a structure made from Yoshino cedar from Nara prefecture. Offering accommodation in two million homes in countries all over the world, Airbnb has turned its attention to the way they are built. “We need to understand where the home is going and what role we want to play in it,” says co-founder Joe Gebbia. “The future of the home is one that is designed to be shared. This is our first exploration into what that could look like.”

The Japanese department-store giant plans to move into the housing business by offering premium home renovations. Here the company worked with architects Makoto Tanijiri and Ai Yoshida of Suppose Design Office to create a home with separate islands for eating, sleeping and bathing. “The concept for this house was a home for a ‘new nomad’: someone who is always travelling and might only spend two weeks a month in Tokyo.” Isetan Mitsukoshi naturally has access to a vast range of products for furnishing a house.

Kenya Hara designed a startling structure with Toppan Printing, which looks like it is made from one giant slab of wood; in fact, the exterior and interior are covered with printed pictures of wood grain. “Nothing is real wood here – everything is printed,” says Hara. Technology appears in words and music that emerge from interior surfaces. “The body interacts with the whole house, visually and aurally. The house looks wooden so it’s a gentle interaction. You feel you are communicating with the environment rather than with the digital world.”

At first glance this spiral-shaped house looks like a yurt but it functions as a hi-tech electrical appliance. The entire curved wall serves as a speaker and a display screen. “Because Panasonic is an electronics company, I thought this project would be about new gadgets but it was more how technology can come into people’s lives,” says architect Yuko Nagayama. “It is very discreet; there is no Panasonic logo and the projectors are hidden. Even the air-conditioning comes through the gap in the floorboards.”

Product designer Fumie Shibata worked with Yamato Holdings, owner of one of Japan’s best-known delivery companies, to create a house with refrigerators built into the exterior wall. Since the refrigerators can be accessed from inside and out, deliveries of fresh food or medicine can be dropped off and kept chilled. The proposal is based on Yamato’s system of having a delivery person within a 10-minute walk of nearly every house in Japanese cities. “Yamato’s idea responds to the situation in Japan in which more people are living on their own in an ageing society,” says Kenya Hara. “If someone is at home there can be face-to-face interaction but if not, things can just be delivered.”

A garden rather than a house, this provides a cool breathing space with wood, water and trees. Architect Kengo Kuma designed the space, Sumitomo Forestry came up with the wood and plant-hunter Seijun Nishihata sourced the beautiful maples. Visitors were encouraged to dip their feet in the water.

Architect Sou Fujimoto teamed up with the residential leasing company Daito Trust Construction with no less an ambition than to redefine rental housing. “Until now rental housing has been about maximising personal space and sacrificing communal space,” says Kenya Hara. “This proposal is the reverse: you shrink your own space and make the communal spaces – the bathroom, kitchen and library – bigger and better designed.” The wood and greenery add to the comfortable ambience. “This concept expresses the ideas in a slightly exaggerated way but our hope is that rental space will become more exciting than a square box.”

Japanese house-builder and retailer Muji has a working relationship with the village of Kamanuma in rural Chiba; it’s a typical Japanese scene with rice paddies and an older population. Muji brings in young people to help with rice planting and harvesting, offering them the chance to experience rural life and traditional Japanese tanada (rice terraces) firsthand. This delightful two-storey structure by Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow – one of three built for House Vision – is designed to function as a meeting space for workers and farmers on the ground floor and an office on the upper floor. “With a computer and internet access you could spend three days a week here,” says Hara. All three buildings will be heading to Kamanuma.

“Shigeru Ban wanted to create a house that was flexible and compact”, says Haruyuki Mizuno of Lixil, the Japanese bathroom and housing-equipment company. Key to the architect’s proposal was an ingeniously neat storage system that holds the air-conditioning, electricity and water units. The pull-down bath is a prototype that could become reality but the showstopper is the window mechanism, which opens up one side of the house and is inspired by the sliding windows found in traditional Japanese homes.