Ryue Nishizawa's "Garden and House" redefines urban living with its wall-less design, blending minimalist architecture and nature into a vertical sanctuary amidst Tokyo's dense high-rises.
Located in the heart of Tokyo, the building challenges conventional spatial logic with its design of floating concrete slabs and glass walls. Rising vertically within an extremely narrow 8x4 meter plot, Nishizawa transforms a cramped and shadowed site into an open, light-filled environment, creating a sanctuary amid the surrounding high-rises. The project, executed in 2009, rethinks how urban dwellers can connect with nature, even in the densest of settings.
The house serves as both a residence and office for two women working in editorial, who required a balance of public and private spaces within their compact home. Nishizawa’s radical design solution replaces walls with floating slabs, organizing the building into a series of stacked horizontal planes. Each floor contains a room and an adjoining garden, seamlessly blurring the line between interior and exterior. The gardens, situated directly outside the rooms, provide moments of respite, allowing residents to step out into fresh air, feel the breeze, or enjoy evening quiet, all while being enveloped in the dense urban fabric of Tokyo.
The transparency of the building, enhanced by the use of glass and the absence of traditional walls, allows natural light to flood the interior despite the shadowed context. Nishizawa's concept privileges spatial fluidity, where each floor offers a different relationship between the room and its garden. The architecture embraces simplicity, eschewing ornamental details in favor of an ascetic beauty tempered by the rhythms of nature. In this innovative home, the act of ascending through light-filled layers becomes an experience of both privacy and connection, intimacy and openness.
