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Wedged between Edo-era workshops and apartment blocks in Tokyo, SOTO-ARCHiTECTS designs House of Tsuzumi, a three-storey volume cinched at its waist to pull morning light into rooms the sun would otherwise skip.
The plot sits on reclaimed coastal land east of central Tokyo, in a district where Edo-period workshops still stand among newer apartment blocks. Buildings to the south rise taller than the site allows; light simulations during planning showed direct sun reaching the ground for less than five hours, between roughly eight and one in the afternoon. To the north, an elementary school keeps its yard open, offering a single line of view across an otherwise closed neighbourhood.
The client works in curation and art sales, and wanted the house to function as one of several short-term bases as well as a small showroom for the collection. The studio responded with a building shaped like a tsuzumi, the hand drum whose hourglass body amplifies sound through its cinched centre. Pinched at the waist on both elevations, the three-storey volume turns its facades inward at angles, opening recessed bays whose windows face the sun rather than the street. The same pinch carves an entrance court at ground level that holds a small garden, shielding the door from the apartments next door.
Inside, the geometry that solves the elevation also shapes the rooms. The pinched corners read as alcoves, small pockets the family uses differently as the sun moves through them. A vertical stair core runs the full height of the north wall, painted high-gloss white and lit from a clerestory at its top. The polish is deliberate: the wall throws daylight down the shaft to floors the sun cannot reach directly, and doubles as a hanging surface for the client's art collection.
The frame is timber, exposed inside as 120mm square posts of pale, unfinished pine. Diagonal steel rods cross between the posts, tensioned into thin white Xs that read as drawn lines rather than hardware. Floors switch from polished concrete on the lower level to oak above. The exterior is clad in vertically ribbed silver-grey metal, a material the streetscape already knows from the small factories nearby; from outside the house reads as a relative of those workshops crossed with the apartment blocks around it.
The site falls inside one of Tokyo's Quasi-Fire Prevention Districts, which normally forces a builder to either bury a timber frame behind gypsum or thicken every member. The studio took a third route: fire-resistant cladding on walls and eaves, and a strict cap on glazing, calculated against the perpendicular distance from each window to the nearest road or neighbour. Cinching the plan deeper increases that measured distance, which raises the allowable window area at the exact points where the angled bays want to open.
After dark the logic reverses. The cladding turns flat blue against the night sky and the cinch reads as a crease catching streetlight; the angled windows glow gold, separated rather than ganged into a curtain wall. The form that hoards light all day spends it all at once after sunset, broadcasting back to the street the small ration it managed to gather.
