The challenges of trying to build in Tokyo's cramped, blaring metropolis need no restating, but it's also apparent that such difficult circumstances can spark incredibly inventive formal and architectural responses. As is the case here, with a house for a couple in the Meguro district of Tokyo, where land costs are stratospheric, but the environs are typically cluttered and dislocated. So the task was to create and sustain an oasis of domesticity by screening out the distracting mess of the surroundings.Though there are obvious formal parallels with the courtyard houses of Iberia and North Africa, here in Tokyo the hermeticism is less about modifying climate and more about tactfully but decisively shutting out an intrusive world.
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