Small Office in Minami Aoyama. This is a project for a small office for a tech start-up company located in a quiet area of Minami Aoyama, Tokyo. Since the total plan was decided in the early stage, I was supposed to design the interior of the president’s room, however, I thought that the relationship of each room would improve the quality of the whole office, so I replanned to design the whole interior design of the office. Therefore, it was premised on a proposal that the cost would not increase significantly from the original general specifications. In this situation, it was needed to provide a president’s office, a meeting room that doubles as a place for several employees to work, and a seminar room for engineer training for other companies.

As the two windows of the building facing the street, I placed small private rooms such as the president’s room and the seminar room on the street side, so that the outside can be seen through the windows to make the space wider. I chose a polycarbonate hollow sheet as a finishing material for the partition, therefore it provides the gaze shielding function while ensuring daylighting through the whole space.

In addition, many electrical outlets were required for the use of servers, communication equipment, seminars, etc. On the other hand, the room is quite small, so the electrical outlets that define the space as an IT office are often seen. By designing their appearance, I thought that the quality of the whole space would change drastically. First, in order to avoid complications, the base steel LGS was cut and the electrical outlets were directly embedded to attach them flat. Furthermore, to unify all the electrical outlets’ installation, LGS is used continuously on the walls or converted to wiring ducts on the ceiling. In addition, The metal frame of the electrical outlets was exposed without a cover plate to harmonize with the texture of LGS.

By working on materials that are usually in the background, I intended to turn them into a positive presence. The functional and stoic appearance is linked to the company’s attitude. While the scale of offices is shrinking due to the COVID-19, the need for real workplaces is being reaffirmed, and I aimed to add value such as individuality and attachment with minimum means.