Ant House by mA-style architects

Japanese architects mA-style have recently completed their 'ant house', a windowless cube in omaezaki-city, Japan. The single family residence confronts the street with dark metal panels, but inside the light plywood is lined with voids and holes for storage, creating a warm internal space with a gabled roof and skylights above. 

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Hybrid Office by Edward Ogosta Architecture

This concept design office for a creative media agency in Los Angeles, by California-based Edward Ogosta Architecture, features "a menagerie of typological hybrids, which together engender a unique interior world". Existing somewhere between furniture and architecture, these additions to the existing concrete warehouse form a playful workspace; for example you can sit in a chair likened to a hollowed out tree trunk, or work at a desk that becomes a room in it's own right. The architecture of the interior space is both internalised and externalised at the same time, rethinking how occupiers use commercial space; employees can collectively group together in the auditorium doubling up as book storage, or they can individually hide away behind a curtain at a 'desk', which is really more like a bed. In a broader sense, workplaces in general have, in recent years, been undergoing transformations in a bid to make them more accessible and friendly, seen in the recent Google Campus or indeed the Google Office by Scott Brownrigg Architects from last year. Certainly a rethinking of how we use work environments needs to be considered, and hopefully to change work spaces from bland, manufactured office desks and depressing grey carpets, to stimulating interiors that foster creative intensity through the use of vibrant props and idiosyncratic furniture, and this is where I think this project can be successful. 

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Storage House by Ryuji Fujimura Architects

Japanese architects Ryuji Fujimura have recently completed Storage House, a single family dwelling located in Kanagawa, a residential suburb in Tokyo. Space saving strategies include utilising the underground space to maximise the floor area, and wooden bookshelves that span from floor to ceiling. 

Images: Design Boom

House K by Yoshichika Takagi

House K by Japanese architect Yoshichika Takagi is an interweaved scenery between interior and exterior. House-shaped indoor rooms are scattered within the main open space, giving a home that feels at once indoors (in terms of thermal environment), but at the same time a feeling of being ‘outdoors’ as a backdrop within the building. These six wooden pods are set within a large exterior that envelops the entire place, one of which forms an outdoor terrace. 

Images: Bookcase Porn

Kaap Skil, Maritime and Beachcombers Museum by Mecanoo Architects

The Maritime and Beachcombers Museum on the island of Texel, Netherlands, by Mecanoo Architects, is designed with four playfully linked gabled roofs, which take on the rhythm of the surrounding roof tops. The wooden facade, made of sawn hardwood sheet-piling from the North Holland Canal, represents the long-held tradition of recycling driftwood from stranded ships or wrecks in Texel. Inside, under the high gabled roofs the visitor gets a generous sense of being able to survey the sizable collection of the museum, as well as viewing the village of Oudeschild and the famous North Holland skies at a glance. 

Images: Mecanoo and ArchDaily