This is a renovation project for a mortared frame apartment, which is built more than 35 years ago. The apartment is an old japanese standard-model. Every room has a small entrance, a small kitchen and a toilet but no bathroom. Nowadays real estate does not accept the room with bath and toilet in one unit, because it is unpopular to the tenants. So a room without bathroom is unthinkable. Hard to find the tenant and inevitably the owner used the apartment as a staff-dormitory. But even when we first visited the apartment, only two rooms of the eight rooms were in use. Naturally, everyone would think, Why does the owner want to keep this old apartment, although the location "senzoku" is in central of Tokyo. The reason is the regulation. The site adjacent to the public road is less than two meters, that means impossible to rebuild the building. So the owner had no choice but to leave the apartment for a long time.
We went on with the renovation project "sumica" with the blue studio. It is hard to build a new bathroom in this article, both by space and by structure reasons. We rediscussed about "for whom" the apartment is. The target will be the students and the new employees in their twenties. We limited the function and placed no bath, but a shower unit. At first we planned where to place the shower unit. Next we rearranged the japanese typical floor-plan. At the boundary to the next room, toilet and "OSHIIRE"(japanese closet) were linearly interlocked. We placed these away and reinterlocked toilet, closet and shower unit.
To save the cost we gave consideration to the design. Not "adding" things, but "leave" the things. We tried to leave the signs of original floor-plan and kept the old pillar uncovered in the center of the room. It is a newly floor-plan. The pillar will recall the memories of "the life divided into two rooms, kitchen and living room" and "the life with OSHIIRE (japanese closet) "
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