From the Archive: Ryue Nishizawa’s Groundbreaking Tokyo Apartment Complex

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s December/January 2007 issue.

On a double suburban lot in Tokyo, the Office of Ryue Nishizawa built a neighborhood-scaled, flexible-format minimalist steel prefab compound for Yasuo Moriyama—a very private individual with a powerful social bent—and six rental tenants. 

Every room is its own building—even Moriyama’s bath is a freestanding box. Here, tradition and innovation interweave to create a new kind of community.

All but one of the residents work in the design field, giving the place the air of a college campus. Moriyama calls all the residents “family.”