OVERVIEW / PHOTOS ANS PLANS

 

 

Name   MAKUHARI BAY NEW TOWN
     
Architects   HOLL, STEVEN
     
Date   1996
     
Address   Chiba, Japan
     
School    
     
Floor Plan    
     
Description   The new town of Makuhari is sited on a dredged fill at the rim of Tokyo Bay. Our concept interrelates two distinct types: silent heavyweight buildings and active lightweight structures. The silent buildings shape urban space and passage with apartments entered via inner garden courts. The concrete bearing walls have thick facades and a rhythmic sequence of openings. Slightly inflected according to sunlight they gently bend space and passage. Celebration of natural phenomena is taken up by the lightweight “activist” forms. Individuated “sounds” invade the heavyweight “silence” of the bracketing buildings. Inspired by Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the semi-public inner gardens and the perspectival arrangement of activist houses form an inner journey.
     
     
     
     
     
Photos and Plan