Trapezoidal shapes define Ryuichi Sasaki’s concrete Tokyo apartments

Tokyo-based Ryuichi Sasaki Architecture has completed SHIN NAKANO trapezoidal, a five-story residential building in the city’s Nakano district that draws on the geography of the Musashino Plateau. The firm had previously completed a minimalist set of concrete apartments on a narrow site in the city.

The latest reinforced concrete condominium occupies a 150,000-square-foot site and provides 11 residential units. The scheme is located on the Musashino Plateau, a large landform in western Tokyo whose topography and groundwater systems have historically supported human settlement.

“The Musashino Plateau is one of those landscapes that people live on without ever seeing,” said Ryuichi Sasaki. “Our challenge was to take something as abstract as a position within a plateau and translate it into a motif that residents encounter every day — in the fa...