Secondary Landscape

From a bird's eye view, the alignment of roofs in Tokyo forms a "second landscape," "another surface. "Tokyo seems to emerge from virgin terrain, still to be discovered.Students, creators in training, are constantly confronted with an urban milieu fragmented into multiple designs. This contract came from a student aesthetician who wished to set up a beauty salon on the roof of a building over forty years old in the Shibuya district.

Mount Fuji wished to make the frontier between these two "landscapes" perceptible to students, the one of the roofs and the one of the city beneath. So they sought to recreate the feeling of another land, to materialize this "second landscape," by covering the roof, cluttered with a mishmash of utilitarian objects, with a rough envelope in wood to give it a new unity and artificiality.

The project was all the more challenging because Tokyo is filled with irregular roofs, distorted by regulations restricting oblique lines. This has resulted in a "relief" of polygonal hills.Though the architect's job is usually to build on a given site, here, to the contrary, Mount Fuji has to create a site from existing heterogeneous architectural structures.

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『Archilab japon』2006.11