KOTO Apartment / NOTAN Office

With the desire both to foreground this potential and to give residents control of the courtyard and garden environment, the street-facing building rises in direct dialogue with the boulevard. At the same time, his second volume, located within the internal enclave, breaks up the garden expanse and separates his two distinct areas: a private rear patio and a communal central garden. The front building houses a two-bedroom apartment duet and a four-bedroom duplex, while the core houses a three-bedroom duplex combined with a workspace. The project is therefore distinguished by its heterogeneity of function and typology, intertwined with an unwavering allegiance to the essential nature of the public sphere and plot.

Urban assimilation. The facades, which develop such a dignified spatial narrative, ensure an architectural reconnection with each other. The building therefore stands as both a watershed and a solid reference point, adjusting perspectives. In a dialectical exchange with its angular counterpart opposite, this façade derives its aesthetic trajectory directly from the built environment. Its materiality is noticeably lighter compared to its surroundings, giving it a more subtle aesthetic rhythm, thereby giving the neighboring buildings the freedom to maintain a good architectural vernacular.

A unified overview of a wide variety of types. KOTO fuses a diverse pantheon of typological structures into a harmonious whole. Two-, three- and four-bedroom residential and professional living spaces are judiciously distributed across bifurcated spaces to form a concise and coherent ensemble. In the melting pot of an urban environment characterized by density and constrained by the exigencies of small plots, the acumen of this project is manifested in its ability to offer a unique microcosm deftly connected by collective expanse. Masu. Facilitated by the building’s volume (combining residential and office space) set within the courtyard site, the common external expanse becomes a tapestry of communal housing.

Versatile and adaptable. The inherent rationality of planning and the adaptability of structural schemas combine to create a spatial paradigm that can respond to the evolving needs of occupants. Its central functional core houses all domestic amenities such as circulation nodes, bathing facilities and cooking facilities, opening up the façade to entertain a kaleidoscopic spatial configuration. The project creates a panorama of residential prospects: a solitary room, a two-room suite, a cross-sectional living environment, a diagonal spatial schema or an orientation favoring garden or street views.