Koichi Takada Architects Carves an Oval Void into a Timber-Louvered Office Block in Shibuya

Shibuya does not reward subtlety. Less than a kilometre from the crossing that defines the district, every frontage competes with signage, screens and the churn of foot traffic. Into this setting Koichi Takada Architects has placed Timber Studio, a five-storey, 1,785 m² commercial building completed in 2021 for an international technology company. The brief calls for spaces where emerging creatives can learn, collaborate and use advanced technology together. The architects describe the result as a creative oasis.

Plenty of offices claim to be oases. What makes this one worth your attention is how literally the facade enacts the idea. A screen of horizontal timber louvers wraps the street elevation, and a large oval is scooped out of it, as if erosion had worn a cave into a stratified cliff. The Sydney-based practice has long chased the idea of nature as an organising logic. Here that idea has to work on a tight Tokyo lot, and the oval is where it either succeeds or falls into gimmick. We think it mostly succeeds, because the same gesture carries through to the interior instead of stopping at the glass.

A Striated Front in a City of Screens

From the street, the building reads first as texture rather than as a mass. The horizontal fins break the elevation into fine bands, and the arched ground-floor opening gives pedestrians a clear point of entry beneath them. Seen obliquely from the side street, the louvers close up into an almost solid timber surface. Head-on, they open to reveal glazing behind. That shift with viewing angle is the facade's quiet achievement: it gives some privacy to the floors without sealing them off.

The angled fins also do useful work in bright sun, framing the glass and catching reflections of nearby foliage. Among Shibuya's glass and backlit cladding, warm timber at this scale stands out without needing to shout. The leafy street tree in front helps, and the building seems designed to borrow from it.

Carving the Oval

The oval recess is the project's signature, and it is more carefully made than a simple cutout. Look up into it and the slats do not just stop at the edge; they curve inward and sweep together, forming a contoured hollow. Hard midday sun turns the recess into a study in shadow, with bands of light raking across each slat and changing through the day.

From inside, the oval frames a view through layered fins toward neighbouring buildings and an ivy-covered wall. That framing matters. In a district where views are mostly of other facades, the architects do not pretend there is a landscape outside. They compose the urban view and soften it with the timber in the foreground. The gesture is sculptural, but it also creates a habitable threshold between the office and the city.

Timber Turned Inward

The interiors take the facade's language and make it softer. Wavy timber slats rise along the walls in layers, ending at a dark ceiling studded with spotlights. In the gallery-like space, a slatted wall sweeps beside a curved white bench and runs toward a glazed end wall. The contrast between pale surfaces, dark soffits and warm wood gives the rooms a calm, lounge-like quality that suits a programme built around shared use rather than assigned desks.

The risk with this kind of continuous feature cladding is monotony, a single idea repeated until it becomes wallpaper. The undulation helps here: because the slats bulge and recede, the walls read as topography rather than finish. Whether that holds up across all five floors is something the images cannot fully tell us, but the spaces shown are confident.

A Spiral Stair as Vertical Spine

The white spiral staircase is the interior's best moment. It winds past a curved wall of timber slats beneath a skylight, so movement between floors becomes a short climb toward daylight. Carpeted treads take the edge off the sculptural steel-and-plaster quality, and the view up into the stair's soffit, with light gathered at the centre and timber edging the frame, echoes the oval recess outside.

For a building meant to foster collaboration, a stair like this does more than any lounge furniture. It encourages people to walk between levels instead of waiting for the lift, and those chance meetings on the stair are exactly what a creative workspace is meant to produce.

Plans and Drawings

The exploded axonometric makes the facade's logic legible. A perforated panel carries the oval cutout, and three contoured slatted forms fill the openings. Set beside the built recess, it shows the design as an assembly of discrete sculpted pieces slotted into a frame, rather than a single carved surface. That is a sensible way to build complex curvature from straight timber members, and it explains how the facade stays so crisp at its edges.

Why This Project Matters

Timber Studio shows how a mid-scale commercial building on a dense urban lot can carry a strong architectural identity without relying on height or spectacle. The oval is memorable, but the project earns credit because that move keeps working as you go inside: in the slatted walls, the gallery and the skylit stair. One idea, executed at several scales, gives the building coherence that most small offices lack.

It also adds to the growing case for timber as a visible, expressive material in Japanese cities, where wood has deep roots but contemporary commercial streets are dominated by glass and metal. We would like to know more about the structure behind the cladding and how the building performs over time. As a piece of urban frontage and as a workplace interior, though, it argues persuasively that warmth and craft belong in a district built on speed.

Timber Studio by Koichi Takada Architects. Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. 1,785 m². Completed 2021. Photography by Daici Ano.

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