Office in Sanno

A curved wooden roof is the distinctive feature of an office built by Velocity Studio in the Japanese city of Okazaki.

Velocity Studio has designed an office in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. The project’s distinctiveness lies in its pillars, so slender that they belie the weight they bear, and in its roof, a fine curved lamina of cypress wood that spans the entire breadth of the building, a friendly-looking construction with the dimensions of the typical one-family dwelling in a Japanese residential neighborhood. Its unique dish shape brings natural light in through height changes, and creates the right kind of space for a high-density residential area.

The curved ends envelop the user and provide a degree of privacy upstairs, a roof terrace intended as a resting area. The diaphanous interior was achieved through an exhaustive study of the flexibility of wood, the properties of which were optimized in order to obtain a curved form without the structural elements standing out. Because it was hard to calculate the resistance of the wood with precision, a greater safety coefficient was applied to each piece, resulting in a light structure that could bear the weight of 150 people, maximum, at once.