Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka In Memory of Helen Keller

This project in Mitaka City manifests the philosophy of the modern artist Shusaku Arakawa, that “home is a tool for me to advance in a direction away from death,” and practices it in the form of residences people actually inhabit. The issues of homes and urban development able to benefit from real affluence, of the kind that Arakawa raises, are not limited to Japan. “Destiny inversion housing” does not stop at a simple idea of ecology. Instead, it focuses on the physical and spiritual impacts buildings have on the people who live in them, builds a “sustainable lifestyle that can be handed on to the next generation,” and proposes it to the world. Within the site, buildings A, B, and C are independent buildings, linked by the outer walkways of steel-framed staircases. Each building consists of a sphere of around 3m in diameter, called the study room, a cylinder of roughly 3m diameter and 3m length for the bathroom and toilet, and a cube of approximately 3m sides for the tatami-floored room and bedroom. Each is a common residential unit, and they are placed opposite each other in a flat circle of around 7m diameter. Each such group is one residence. The center of the circular plane that links the residential units is the kitchen and the floor around it has a gradient of around 1/20, in a gently rising concrete floor. One residence has three levels, and each residential unit is linked to the levels above and below, with each level displaced by a quarter turn. Each building has three levels with three residences on each, for a total of nine residences. Each residential unit has walls of precast reinforced concrete (WPC) and the units are stacked vertically on three levels forming a large column that supports the load of the whole structure. Buildings A and C have residential units in the four corners, while building B consists of residential units in three positions and wall columns to adjust eccentricity and rigidity.