The City of 'Pencil Buildings'

Densification of a built environment can take various forms depending on specific contexts. In Tokyo where land redistribution frequently happens between landowners for profits and tax avoidance, 'pencil buildings' emerge on fragmented lots with extremely limited footprints and as many floors as possible. In dense neighborhoods such as Shibuya and Ginza, the proliferation of pencil buildings brings imaginations of Tokyo's future urbanscape.

In addition to portraying the emerging city of pencil buildings, this drawing proposes a co-living scenario inside a pencil building with less than 4-meter width. Although densification physically brings people close to each other, the potential social segregation brought by verticality is hard to remediate. In response to the needs of new generations to socialize and share costs of living, a pencil building can perform as a co-living hub with each floor accommodating a distinctive activity that could happen in residential life.