Where the Michigan project is more of a conventional structural cantilever, the new K Clinic in the Japanese city of Nara, just outside of Osaka, takes a minimalist approach to integrate the architecture fully into the structure. The Tokyo architect and engineer Akira Yoneda, whose firm, Architecton, was chosen for record’s 2004 Vanguard, had less program space to incorporate for his client, a dermatologist who had briefly studied architecture while in college. The doctor asked Yoneda to design a building that would make a statement along the city’s main street. The clinic is located in a ground-level structure, while the cantilever is reserved for the doctor’s private study. The opening at the end reveals a view of distant mountains.
The nearly 55-foot-long cantilevered volume is a tube structure formed by steel plates and a deck. Yoneda treated the surface of the plates with a ceramic insulating paint to improve the thermal properties. He wanted the building to recall the neighborhood’s previous topography, which was defined by a gently sloping hill. For Yoneda, the linear shape of the building “reflects the inclination of the street and tried to reify the missing profile of the land.” He considers the cantilever a continuation of a Modernist project of dialectical investigation—physical and phenomenal, gravitational and antigravitational, materialization and dematerialization, and anchoring and drifting. “I think a cantilever is one of those topics that is still worth considering,” Yoneda says.
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