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. 

As visiting architect Junko Ishii puts it, “Outside the compound, our awareness is different. Within, we can concentrate on our own realm. This is a pure white space.”