Kazuyo Sejima, Seijoville, Tokyo
For the Seijo Townhouses in Tokyo, Kazuyo Sejima experiments with a singular model of a special kind of collective housing – for client/buyers ready to pay more than the already demanding prices of real estate in Tokyo today. 
The townhouses that just saw completion this past summer in the Seijo district, roughly southwest of downtown Tokyo, are important in the approach applied here, with housing units that bring together ideas of community and privacy, abstract form, simplicity and refinement.
The aim of the project was to create a miniature urban settlement that gives each apartment both a formal and spatial character that it becomes something of a little townhouse. But this is effected without destroying the opportunity to socialise – and without interrupting the unity of the complex as a whole. For this a particular spatial module was applied, so that once it is assembled it multiplies in different directions and schemes, projecting a type of urban life outward to the rest of the city.
Here the pink-ish bricks covering the outside of the building reflecting light inside the apartments like soft mirrors, the large glazed openings have a view out onto the other houses without looking into the other interiors; and small gardens weave artfully around the townhouses.
Photos Iwan Baan
