25 August 2011

Tokyo Skypartment ~ Roboparking + Penthouse

Brilliant solution to tight property constraints and need for income and housing in Lloyd Alter's Treehugger piece In Tokyo, Parking Cars Makes More Money Than Parking People...
"Land assembly is tough in Tokyo; families often have owned little tiny plots for generations. These become their main source of income and they rarely sell them, to develop them, they often build really silly and inefficient sliver buildings with minuscule footprints. This one, by Martin Van Der Linden of Van Der Architects, has a floor area of 74.4 square meters, or 800 square feet. [...] When the owners of a rather small plot of land in Central Tokyo approached us to design an apartment complex the discussion on return on investment quickly led to the idea to forget about apartments and to start thinking about parking. A parking tower has the possibility to create on a relatively small plot of land a high return on investment. The idea to make use of the almost fanatical desire to own a car and to take it to the centre of Tokyo (where it needs to be parked). The parking tower with a penthouse at the top is an opportunistic way of living in the centre of Tokyo while using other people's money to pay for the mortgage."

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