# Moriyama House — A City Inside a Building #### Overview A house of scattered volumes, walked with an old travel companion, turned out to be a city. --- *October 12, 2026. Moriyama House in Tokyo (Ryue Nishizawa, 2005), a residence made of separate small volumes scattered across one site. I was invited to an eyewear pop-up held there, and went with an older friend I had travelled through Italy with thirty years ago.* When I climbed the stairs of the main volume, the sky suddenly opened up. The roofs of the buildings below looked like terraces, places to hang laundry or to sit. The air reminded me of a piazza I once visited in Italy. A feeling I had thought could only be found by travelling far away was here, inside everyday life. I felt that a single building can change how one perceives the world. It was the same feeling I had walking through the Gallaratese housing by Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi: that the building itself is a city. What stayed with me there was not Rossi's 180-metre portico, but the yellow spaces that had settled into time. Perhaps that memory returned because I was not alone. The friend who came with me is the same person I travelled through Italy with thirty years ago. Walking through a town together again, even briefly, brought that journey back. Walking a city with someone is a wonderful thing. Had I come alone, I probably would not have remembered that time. The host who invited me told me about the maker of MEGANE ROCK. I bought the No. 15 and tried on other frames. I like the idea of carefully remaking something that feels nostalgic, and through the object I felt a connection to the people behind it. --- Spaces that appear and disappear between the volumes loosely connect the private and the public. Even within one building, it is made so you can feel the soil, and it opens onto outdoor spaces hidden from view. The units of space we perceive overlap and fold onto one another, layering the space richly. I was also interested to hear that the owner planned to rent out several of the volumes at first and, over time, take more of them for his own use. As a way of making a building, that is a fascinating idea. --- An archipelago of volumes, with room left between them, that people can walk through: this is what gives rise to a city, a space where people come to be involved with one another. **Might the same be true not only of physical sites, but of the spaces where a community's content lives?** --- - [[Viewing from a height]] — clusters of the city seen from above - [[Maggie’s Centres Architecture and Landscape Brief]] — the scale of a home rather than an institution