A Departure Point for Connection: Design & Dialogue in Tsukuba

In the cerebral sprawl of Tsukuba, Japan’s renowned "Science City," the urban narrative has long been one of rapid acceleration. Born from a 1987 administrative merger and energized by the arrival of the Tsukuba Express in 2005, the city has become a global magnet for intellect, drawing researchers, students, and academics from every corner of the earth. Yet, in this rush to construct the future, the city was left with a distinct human void.

While the station front gleams with efficiency, the city has lacked the "third places" essential for a mature community: spaces where newly arrived international scientists and long-settled local residents can simply interact. The challenge was clear: how do you create a "commoning" space in a city shaped by transience?

The answer emerges quietly, in the form of a project that is part gallery, part sanctuary, and wholly devoted to the art of connection.

A Sanctuary of Light and Curves

L’hirondelle is designed by Hiro Nakata Atelier, based in Japan. Stepping inside, one is immediately struck by the project’s refusal to be merely a point of commercial transaction. The design language speaks of embrace. The eye is drawn first to the entrance, where a sweeping, arc-shaped wall guides the visitor inward. Finished in white plaster (shikkui), the wall features recessed niches carved directly into the surface. These shelves hold coffee beans and goods not as merchandise, but as art pieces, bathed in a soft, diffuse light that gently washes over the mortar floor. This is a masterclass in the art of subtraction, removing visual noise to amplify a sense of calm.

The Materiality of Time

In a city often obsessed with the new, this space bravely champions the beauty of age. The spatial choreography centers around a striking U-shaped counter, designed to dissolve the barrier between barista and guest. Look closer at the details: the wainscoting is clad in rusted iron plates.

This choice of oxidized metal is poetic. It introduces texture and the passage of time, a patina, into the pristine environment. Paired with the warmth of dark wood, leather, and hand-finished plaster, these materials ground the space. It feels tactile and real, a deliberate counterpoint to the sterile laboratories that populate the city.

Framing the View

The genius of the layout lies in its permeability. A low, continuous wooden bench runs along the glazing, inviting patrons to sit and gaze outward. The architecture borrows the lush greenery of the streetscape, drawing the changing seasons into the shop. This visual connection does more than please the eye; it serves as a bridge, blurring the line between the private sanctuary within and the vibrant public life outside.

A New Social Fabric

Ultimately, this project is fueled by the belief that coffee possesses the power to transcend borders. By collaborating with local artisans on the furniture and cultivating a gallery-like atmosphere, the shop weaves itself into the regional story.

This is a space designed to grow deeper, not merely older. As the iron develops richer patina and the wood darkens, as conversations among strangers blossom into friendships, this corner of Tsukuba is becoming exactly what the city needs: a departure point for a journey toward a warmer, more connected future.

This Project is one of the submission from Merci x Sky Design Awards 2026

Company: hiro nakata atelier

Website: https://hnkt-a.com

The Daily Ritual: Finding Stillness in Beijing’s SanYuanLi Market

Nestled within Beijing’s SanYuanLi Food Market, this compact café is shaped as profoundly by its context as by the rhythms of daily life. Unlike traditional wet markets, SanYuanLi caters to a diverse residential community and sits at the crossroads of the city’s diplomatic quarter and the hotel-lined banks of the Liangma River. This unique setting imbues the market with a character that is at once intensely local and subtly cosmopolitan, creating an atmosphere rich with movement, interaction, and daily ritual.

Positioned at the market’s northern entrance, the café stands at a vital threshold. One façade engages the street, while the other establishes the first retail encounter within the market, naturally attracting passers-by. Despite its modest 25-square-metre footprint, the café serves as a distinct urban node. It is compact in size, yet remarkably prominent within the daily choreography of the market.

Inspired by Colin Rowe’s concept of contextualism in Collage City, the project contemplates the city as a tapestry of intertwined histories rather than a linear narrative. In many modern developments, incremental urban renewal has inadvertently diminished the vibrancy of street life, replacing authentic complexity with neutral, impersonal norms. Traditional markets, once vibrant vessels of collective memory, have been especially susceptible to this erosion.

This project aspires to renew the connection between street, community, and public life. Rather than positioning the café as an isolated entity, B.L.U.E Architecture embraces a dual approach: forging a distinct spatial identity while remaining deeply anchored in the market’s everyday logic. The goal is not to idealise the past, but to enable memory, routine, and contemporary function to coexist harmoniously.

Uniqueness: Reintroducing Energy into the Everyday

SanYuanLi Market reveals a quiet sophistication beneath its informal exterior, a quality reflected in Grid Coffee’s stand-and-sip culture and its generous coffee experience. The café’s entrance façade responds with a purposefully unrefined yet carefully composed design. Cast concrete elements frame transient moments of pause: people stopping, leaning, drinking, transforming everyday actions into a living tableau. Against this substantial backdrop, a handcrafted copper door adds warmth and tactility, asserting its presence without dominating the vibrant market environment.

On the market-facing façade, the selling window is both functional and performative. Its custom opening mechanism transforms each purchase into a meaningful interaction. When closed, the hand-hammered copper surface resembles a work of art, maintaining a quiet presence amidst the surrounding activity.

Inside, the spatial experience is carefully orchestrated. A sculptural bar delineates two distinct yet interconnected zones: ordering and standing. Its precise geometry lends clarity to the compact layout, while recessed niches and angled surfaces accommodate varied uses with understated elegance. The ritual of coffee, brief, upright, and attentive, is afforded dignity and focus, elevating the ordinary to the exceptional.

Everyday Sensibility: Extending the Market’s Logic

Instead of importing foreign concepts, the design absorbs and reinterprets the market’s inherent rhythms. SanYuanLi’s stalls operate with immediacy. Display, storage, and transaction unfold simultaneously within compact footprints. This principle is mirrored in the café’s inner façade, where window-style retail openings foster both visual and social continuity with neighboring vendors, dissolving the boundary between café and market.

Coffee beans are displayed openly at the bar and retail windows, reinforcing a direct, unmediated connection between product and consumer. Hanging price tags, ubiquitous throughout the market, are reinterpreted for the café, allowing prices and offerings to change with the seasons and supply. Solid wood boards, each with unique textures and tones, serve as adaptable markers rather than permanent signage, underscoring the themes of temporality and daily transformation.

Throughout the project, the spirit of the market is not replicated but abstracted. Variations in form and material are secondary to the preservation of atmosphere: movement, negotiation, and familiarity. The outcome is a space that feels truly embedded, not merely inserted, into its context.

Materiality and Craft

Given the limited scale, material restraint is balanced with tactile richness. Concrete, copper, wood, and aggregates are employed sparingly yet expressively, letting texture, patina, and variation shape the visual narrative. Handcraft is central, not as an act of nostalgia, but as a way to align the space with the vibrant imperfection of its surroundings.

The sliding entrance doors consist of 175 oxidized copper squares interwoven with cherry wood fragments, each piece assembled by hand. This intentionally irregular surface resists uniformity, celebrating craftsmanship. At the bar, single-origin coffee beans from Grid Coffee are embedded within the countertop aggregate, establishing a subtle and playful material dialogue between product and surface.

The ribbed concrete façade reveals its aggregate, while elm wood is reserved for surfaces that invite touch, such as backrests and storage tables. The natural patina of the wood imparts warmth and a sense of quiet familiarity.

This project exemplifies how modest interventions can recalibrate the social and spatial energy of a neighborhood. By engaging with memory rather than resisting it, the café transcends its function as a place to drink coffee, becoming a vital connective tissue within the market’s daily life. In this way, it offers a contemporary vision of urban belonging: understated, rooted, and deeply attuned to the realities of everyday living.

This Project is one of the submission from Merci x Sky Design Awards 2026

Company: B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio

Website: www.b-l-u-e.net

Radical Resilience: The Off-Grid House in Amami Ōshima

On the subtropical center of Amami Ōshima, an emerging residential typology has quietly emerged, one that rejects centralized infrastructure in favor of radical autonomy. Born from a necessity to address the accelerating environmental shifts and the fragility of remote regions, the Off-Grid House is less a mere dwelling and more a laboratory for future living.

The project represents a sophisticated dialogue with the island’s vernacular memory. Confronted by the island’s notoriously low solar irradiation, comparable to northern Japan, the residence functions as a self-circulating ecosystem, defying the region’s oppressive humidity without external power or air conditioning.

Architecturally, the home deconstructs the historical buntō (multi-volume) layout into five distinct geometric volumes. This separation creates a network of in-between spaces, fluid thresholds that dissolve the boundary between human habitation and the natural world Reanimating Amami’s spirit of yui (collective cooperation), the architecture accommodates the island’s traditional large-scale gatherings, proving that even in an age of uncertainty, the home can remain a vital cultural platform.

The Architect’s Statement

When I began the design of my residence in central Amami Ōshima, total disconnection from the power grid was not the initial intent. However, as environmental degradation accelerates and extreme weather becomes our new normal, that choice has become inevitable.

The decision was catalyzed by a mountain property I purchased three years ago. This was a place where I began developing micro-infrastructure to live independently. I wanted to prepare for unforeseen crises while envisioning creative forms of resilience for Japan’s aging, depopulated regions. However, implementing full self-sufficiency deep in the mountains proved difficult.

• The Urban Experiment: To test the feasibility of off-grid living, I chose my own urban residence as the experimental site. Their main challenge was the island’s limited sunlight. After evaluating wind, hydro, and geothermal options, solar remained the only practical path. Ten days before the groundbreaking ceremony, I decided to sever the national grid connection completely.

• Vernacular Engineering The result is an autonomous house that allows a family of four to live comfortably, rooted in the island’s vernacular memory.

• Spatial Logic: Inspired by the region’s historical buntō style, the house consists of five independent volumes (bath, bedroom, storage, etc.). The spaces between these volumes serve as shared living areas, connecting fluidly to verandas and gardens.

• Climate Response: The roof form reinterprets local corrugated-metal and irimoya profiles. It integrates layers of insulation and ventilation while referencing elevated Takakura granaries. This allows wind to pass freely in all directions to combat humidity.

Sustainability in a Living Ecosystem is circular in nature. A small wood-fired sauna uses construction offcut fuel. Food waste is composted and returned to the vegetable garden, creating a closed loop between the builder, the site, and the family’s table.

Amami is known as the Island of Ties. While traditions fade with urbanization, this house restores cultural rhythm.

Family celebrations often gather over eighty relatives, continuing late into the night. The open, tolerant spaces of this house naturally invite people to gather, blurring the distinction between private dwelling and communal place. This project redefines contemporary home as both a shelter and a cultural platform. It is an architecture that sustains life beyond the grid while inheriting the spirit of Yui. It is a quiet re-examination of what it means to inhabit in the age of environmental uncertainty.

This Project is one of the submission from Merci x Sky Design Awards 2026

SAKAI ARCHITECTS :

Website: https://sakaiarchitects.com/index.html