On a corner plot in Nagoya, Tomoaki Uno Architects builds Shironishi Office as a box of bare steel left to rust, part workplace, part hobby room, part indoor ball court for the client's three children.
Shironishi Office occupies a corner plot in a mixed residential block of Nagoya, 80 square metres of it, next door to the concrete house the same client commissioned from Tomoaki Uno roughly a decade ago. The brief asked for a workplace and, with equal weight, for somewhere to keep hobbies and let three children loose. The client fishes, so the programme took in a kitchen for preparing the catch, and a sauna.
The children set the harder constraint. They wanted to play catch indoors and throw a ball against the wall for baseball practice, so the partition walls on either side of the interior are steel plate 30mm thick, heavy enough that a hardball comes back with force. A basketball hoop was on the list too, and the section was raised to take it. What looks like severity is closer to permission: a room detailed so that nothing in it can be broken.
None of it was meant to look this way. The scheme was timber framed and all but finished when, at a late meeting, the client pointed to the wood-burning stove standing on the terrace of the house and asked, “Mr Uno, could you make a building that will rust like that?” Uno proposed starting the design again from scratch. Replacing timber with steel was not a change of appearance. It was an attempt to draw time into the material and to treat the building as something in continual change.
What went up is a box of hot-rolled plate, mill scale still clouding across the panels in grey and blue, the rolling mill's stencilled markings left where the sheets arrived. Exposed flanges divide each elevation into bays, a folded steel angle caps the parapet, and the doors are flush plate with turned bar handles. One face catches the afternoon sun and reads almost silver while the return stays the colour of wet slate. Rust is coming up through both at its own pace.
Inside, everything is black plate and pale concrete, crossed overhead by threaded tie rods that meet in shallow V's above a mezzanine. Square steel shafts set in a grid pull daylight down from the skylights, though brightening the room was never the point. Uno wanted to see what scene sunlight would make once it had passed through them, and calls the device a wind instrument of light: illumination falling through the shafts, and finer patterns in the gaps between the uprights, shifting with the hour, the season and the weather.
Almost a year after completion the steel is still turning. Uno's argument is that a building is wrongly treated as most itself on handover day and then held there indefinitely, when what wind, rain, light and air etch into it over the years is the value rather than the defect. A stove burns on the concrete floor and the wall behind it darkens. The building the client asked for is the one that keeps changing.
