Ryuichi Sasaki Gives Western Tokyo's Geography a Concrete Form in a Five-Storey Nakano Apartment Block

Shin Nakano Residence, built under the name Grantage Shin Nakano, is a small apartment building with an outsized ambition. Designed by Ryuichi Sasaki and his practice, Sasaki Architecture, it places eleven units across five storeys and a basement on a tight plot in the Chuo district of Nakano. The total floor area is just 416 m², so the units are compact. Reinforced concrete and glass do most of the talking.

What makes the project worth your attention is the brief Sasaki set himself. He did not frame it as a rental block to be optimised. He describes it as an attempt to give architectural form to the geography that has shaped life in western Tokyo for millennia. That is a big claim for a building of this size. The interesting question is how far a facade, a stair and a handful of windows can carry it. Our answer: further than you might expect, and mostly through careful misalignment.

A Concrete Face That Refuses the Grid

From the street, the block reads as a single board-formed concrete slab punctured by square openings. Nothing about it is unusual so far. Then you notice that the windows do not stack. Each one sits slightly off from the one above or below. The form-tie holes hold a strict, even rhythm, and the openings drift across it.

This is the first legible move toward the geographic idea. The tie-hole grid behaves like a survey: regular and neutral. The windows behave like terrain, settling where the plan below needs them rather than where a facade diagram would put them. The small planted bed at the base is modest, but it softens the point where the concrete meets the pavement.

Windows Split on the Diagonal

The most distinctive detail is the treatment of the openings themselves. Several square recesses are cut diagonally. Dark glass fills one triangle and a ribbed, stone-textured panel fills the other. In sunlight, the ribbing throws fine shadows that read almost like layered sediment.

The diagonal serves several purposes at once. It controls how much each unit is exposed to a dense street. It breaks the square into something closer to a slope. It also gives the flat concrete wall a sense of strata. If you want to see where the geographic concept becomes material, look here. The geography is not depicted. It is suggested through texture and inclination.

A Lantern in a Low-Rise Neighbourhood

At dusk the reading changes. The scattered windows glow at different heights, and the block stops looking like a monolith. It starts to look like a stack of separate lives. Seen beside neighbouring houses and parked vans, the building is taller than its surroundings. Even so, its scale stays domestic because no two lit openings line up.

The night view of the narrow side elevation shows a lit sliding window above a basement light well. It is a reminder that the section goes below grade. The building claims daylight wherever the site allows it.

An Entrance Built from Leaning Piers

The ground floor entry is where the concrete loosens. Slanted piers frame a passage lined with mailboxes, utility meters and a brushed steel elevator door. A gravel strip with stepping plates leads in. The angled piers echo the diagonals on the facade above, and they turn a functional corridor into something closer to a pass between two inclines.

Warm lighting by Natsuha Kameoka of Lighting Sou keeps the space from feeling like a service alley. This is often the weakest part of small Tokyo apartment buildings, so the attention it receives here is notable.

Stairs and Shafts That Pull Light Down

On a plot this tight, the stair is the main organising element. The common stair rises in concrete with open steel grating treads that let light filter down from a skylight. Above, an angled shaft cuts through the concrete ceiling toward white walls and a rooflight. The geometry is not decorative. It bends daylight into the depth of the building.

Inside the units, a narrow white stairwell with concrete treads drops from a timber floor. The palette is limited, but the contrast between warm wood and grey concrete marks the shift between where you live and how you move.

Interiors Organised Around the Void

The living levels keep the concrete ceiling exposed and put the stair opening on view. Glass balustrades and angled white metal guards define the void without closing it off. As a result, the stair works as a light source and a spatial anchor rather than a leftover. A grey kitchen counter sits low and quiet against the side window.

From the upper landing, windows frame neighbouring apartment blocks. Sasaki does not hide the density of Nakano. He edits it, offsetting each opening so that views slip past the windows across the street.

Rooms Tuned by a Slot of Sky

One unfinished room shows the elements most clearly: wood plank floor, white walls and a tiled grey stone wall washed by a skylight slot above. The stone surface catches light the way a cliff face does in late afternoon. It is another quiet nod to the landscape idea.

The bedroom and dining images are renderings rather than photographs, so read them as intent rather than evidence. They suggest the units are meant to be furnished lightly, with timber and soft textiles set against the concrete. Foliage-filled windows are planned wherever the site edge allows.

Plans and Drawings

The site map places the building within a dense grain of small plots and narrow streets. The site plan shows an irregular polygon footprint, with park trees running along its eastern edge. That green edge likely explains why some windows are oriented the way they are. The floor plans, from basement to fifth floor, reveal angular unit layouts arranged around a shared stair and wet core. The angles in plan explain the off-axis windows on the facade.

The section stacks the floors over a basement, with a central stair run and an angled top-floor volume that gives the building its sloped crown. The south elevation sets the even form-tie grid against square windows that shift from floor to floor. On paper, the idea is easier to see than on site.

The detail drawings show how the textured panels sit within the exposed concrete wall, and how the windows migrate across levels. The cutaway axonometric reads like a geological core sample: stacked rooms, a single stair, plants and figures pressed behind a panelled concrete skin.

Why This Project Matters

Small apartment blocks make up a huge share of Tokyo's housing, and most are designed to a formula. Shin Nakano Residence shows that a 416 m² building with eleven units can still carry a conceptual position without sacrificing its basic function. The geographic idea never becomes a literal hill or a themed facade. It appears in offset openings, diagonal panels, leaning piers and light shafts. Each of these also solves a practical problem of privacy, daylight or circulation.

The lesson for architects working on tight urban plots is that conviction can sit in the details. Sasaki takes the most ordinary materials of the Tokyo apartment, concrete and glass, and pushes them slightly off their expected alignment. That small shift is enough to make the building feel rooted in a place, rather than placed on a lot.

Shin Nakano Residence (Grantage Shin Nakano) by Ryuichi Sasaki, Sasaki Architecture. Location: Nakano, Tokyo, Japan. Area: 416 m². Year: 2024. Design team: Yuriko Ogura, Anna Osawa. Structural engineering: Tatsumi Terado Structural Studio. Lighting: Natsuha Kameoka / Lighting Sou. Contractor: Magome Construction Company. Photography: Takumi Ota Photography.

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