Billboard

In Suzuka Knit Design Office +S organized an office, a warehouse and residences as a small community coated with metal sheets to reflect the life that happens around it, like a billboard.

Knit Design Office +S designed a flagship office of a printing company whose headquarter is situated in the Greater Tokyo area.

The new office, covering the Kansai and Chubu regions, is situated in Suzuka City, Mie Prefecture. The program includes an office, a warehouse serving as a hub for long distance transport, company housing and guest rooms. The company’s intention is to ensure that this office will be rooted in the community, and also to ensure a pleasant living environment for residents.

Responding to these intentions, the architects decided to provide an office on the ground floor and residences on the second floor.

The office on the first floor is loosely divided into the reception area and the work area by partitions made of 4.5 mm-thick steel, which form an organically curved white plane running between thin steel structural columns with 100 mm in diameter. It suggests the image of a seamless flow of white paper ejected from a high-speed printer. It gives off different impressions as office staff or visitors move along the wall, while serving as a screen reflecting interactions within the “showcase” of human activities.

Small huts (housing units), clad in various metal sheets with different reflectance properties are built on top of the office roof, which is a roof garden with greenery and wood decks made of local timber. Each hut is about the same size as a typical billboard of the area. The huts are clad in various kinds of metal sheets with different reflectance properties.

The ever-changing sky and the surrounding environment are reflected on the surface, scenes in everyday lives are mirrored and the lively atmosphere is transmitted to the outside. This is an analogy to printing, expressing the process of input (information) and output (printing on paper).

The front facade is rather austere with no windows, and on the contrary the east facade is quite open with large windows to bring ample morning light inside. Each of the huts facing east is colored in cyan, magenta, yellow and black respectively, representing basic color components (CMYK) of printing ink. At night, they become lanterns emitting colored lights to illuminate the surrounding environment.