Orange House in Tokyo by Norisada Maeda

The studio of Japanese architect Norisada Maeda designed a family house in the Tokyo district of Meguro that would make any safety technician in Europe cringe in horror. The main living space is a spirally twisted room with glass sections in the floor and staircases lacking handrails. Nothing suggests that children would enjoy this sterile environment full of hazards, but the opposite is true. The architect designed the entire house, with a usable area of 120 m², so that children feel like they are in a large play structure with countless overcoming possibilities. The 'Orange House' (or 'Citrus House') is not orange at all. It knows no other color than white (if white is a color). However, the spiral room running through the house resembles a twisted peel of an orange. There is also a diametrical contrast between the cubic outer shell and the organically shaped interior of the house. What Maeda wanted to achieve was for “children to discover that the living room is a unique place and not just a machine for living.” The primary idea happened entirely by chance when one of Maeda's collaborators played with a polystyrene block cutter (which probably had an orange color). They then started to assign meaning to this chance occurrence, assigning specific functions to the resulting space until a whole phenomenological-ontological study emerged, which, however, leaves the main users of the house indifferent, as they primarily come home to have fun.