The installation you see above is a project by Masakazu Shirane and Saya Miyazaki called "Wink," their entry into Kobe Biennial's Art Container Contest. The kaleidoscope concept uses mirrors (in keeping with Sir David Brewster's classic), but is also held together by zippers. Shirane and Miyazaki claim this makes it the first "architecture" based on zippers; proving you can create an adaptable, reconfigurable space using the same tech found in your pants. — engadget.com

As Okinawa and Kyushu prepare to take the brunt of what was until Monday categorized as a “super typhoon,” local infrastructure will be pushed to its limits, especially in Kyushu, where the area is saturated from heavy rains last week. — The Diplomat

Oita, a medium-sized manufacturing city in the southwest of Japan, hopes to make its mark next summer as the host of the first Toilennale—an arts festival celebrating toilets. [...]

Tourism is the main focus of the art exhibit, but the Toilennale also promises to improve city services by renovating and beautifying bathrooms throughout downtown, beyond the 12 being turned into installations. — qz.com

Tokyo’s extreme housing production and resulting market is a product of Japan’s uniquely liberal zoning rules. Taken along with its dense network of profitable, private railways, Tokyo is the closest thing this planet has to a city that has completely surrendered itself to market forces. And its construction numbers show it. — nextcity.org

That's because, as the economists Richard Koo and Masaya Sasaki show in a report, 15 years after being built the average house is worth nothing. [...] "It's not environmentally sustainable but also not financially sustainable. People work very hard to pay off a mortgage that's ultimately worth zero."

[...] It has also produced a huge number of architects, who are kept busy by buyers wanting a new house that reflects their lifestyle. — theguardian.com

Rooftop farms have been established all over the world to enable growing food in dense urban areas. In Japan, a whole new kind of an urban rooftop farm was opened recently. Soradofarm is an urban agriculture project that uses the rooftops of train stations to accommodate urban gardens for waiting train passengers that want to use their transfer time to relax and train their gardening skills. — popupcity.net

What is “micro public space”?...To date, Atelier Bow-Wow have presented, in exhibition settings, numerous installations featuring small structures, furniture and so on...More than just small buildings, these works are devices supporting the interaction and activities of all sorts of people, and while compact in size, create places open to a diverse audience". — The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art

When it comes to museums, Hiroshi Sugimoto doesn’t mince words.

“This is the worst space I ever encountered,” he told the Journal before opening a retrospective of his work at Seoul’s Leeum Samsung Museum of Art late last year. The Japanese artist was especially unhappy about a steep escalator leading down into the main gallery space of the OMA-designed building. “Why do that? It’s terrible,” he lamented. “I feel a kind of bad will from this architect.” — blogs.wsj.com

Space Oddity was conceived by rub-a-dub in 2012, while studying under the DRL at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, a post-professional MArch program. They state that while their proposal "is obviously not a viable option for actual space travel...Lately there has being a lot of noise about space design...We believe a lot of these projects are only solving technical issues".

Fred Scharmen was intrigued "Very nice work. Thanks for posting this".

The hotel's name refers to the idea that you'd only need to spend nine hours there — a radical concept in a world of lodging that offers a host of amenities to tempt you away from the place you're actually meant to be visiting. But the people behind Nine Hours believe you're better off spending as little time as possible under their roof: just one hour to get ready for bed, seven hours to sleep, and one hour to get up in the morning. — theverge.com

Ryusuke Nanki, a Tokyo-based designer and former student of Shigeru Ban, was the head of production and design for the first European showing of the "L'art de Rosanjin" exhibition at the Guimet Museum in Paris that happened from July 3 to Sept. 9.

The continuous flow of the exhibition space, pillars, and beams are an ode to traditional Japanese architecture, while a soft palette of whites and grays express the sophistication of epicure and artist Rosanjin Kitaôji. — bustler.net