vertical garden house

You may have a difficult time believing your eyes, but what looks like a public garden in the above photograph is, in fact, four-story vertical home in Tokyo.

Designed by architect Ryue Nishizawa, this house, and the fact that it's a house at all, kind of boggles the mind. As Roberto Zancan, who wrote about it for domus, explains:

With no true facade, all that emerges in the anonymous front are the from bottom to top: the living room and kitchen on the ground floor, followed by the first bedroom on the floor above, moving on to a bathroom, then to a second bedroom, and finally to the roof-terrace, where a tiny room is located, used either as a guest room or extra storage. No interior walls divide the surface area into "rooms". Only full-height windows and curtains form the separation between the interior and the amenities placed in the exterior: a bathroom and laundry room, along with benches and planters functioning as parapets. Other inventions on these curious terraces include design features such as an oval-shaped "meeting room" created by enclosing a table with a curtain. The feeling of living in a hanging garden is emphasised by a thin layer of soil spread out on the floor of the upper room and by the continuous transition between inside and out.

That's right, not only are there any interior walls, but there's no facade to speak of, with only floor-to-ceiling windows, curtains, planters, and appliances dividing up these unusual spaces. It's certainly not the kind of place one could readily imagine living in, but you have to give these guys credit for their daring, highly unusual, and visually arresting creation.

(Images courtesy of domus, with photography by Iwan Baan. Via Spoon & Tomago)