Elements of the ordinary. Eight projects in Tokyo

Tokyo's challenging urban landscape has established as one of the most fertile ground for housing architecture over the last decades. The ever-increasing urban scenario of the city itself can be seen as an organic macro-organism where everything is somehow accepted, a semi-spontaneous architectural aggregation. Contemporary Tokyo is a complex agglomerate of masses where the establishment of various physical and visual layers led to a proliferation of different solutions. Here everything is possible, no space is wasted. Analyzing architecture as a matter of size and elements might be dangerous elsewhere but not in Tokyo, where the city itself is able to metabolize and embody changes at a very fast speed. The subject of this research is the ordinary architecture, the one that feeds the continuos metamorphosis of the city. The elements of this architecture are therefore an interesting case study which serves as the ground for the design of eight single-family houses. Each submitted project offers a different interpretation of an element, stretching it as the compositional theme of the project itself.