Sejima’s contribution, completed just before she and Ryue Nishizawa founded SANAA, has become the most widely studied. Her ten-storey slab on pilotis combines maisonettes and double-height units with terraces and sunrooms, layering inside and outside in ways that subtly disrupt the conventions of Japanese apartment blocks. The building’s stark white surfaces and carefully balanced voids embody the restrained yet experimental qualities that would come to define Sejima’s later practice.
Over two decades later, the structure continues to hold up, both materially and conceptually. Seen alongside other Kitagata blocks—many now showing their age—Sejima’s remains a touchstone, suggesting how collective housing might accommodate openness, permeability, and play. The presence of multiple female architects in the project also marked a significant, if under-discussed, moment in the history of Japanese housing design.
The Kitagata project belongs to the same moment of experimentation that produced Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s Reversible Destiny Lofts in Mitaka (2005). While Kitagata explored how new housing typologies could open daily life to light, air, and subtle disruption, the Lofts pushed this to a radical extreme—treating disorientation itself as a mode of living. Taken together, these experiments underscore how the 1990s in Japan were shaped by both architectural pragmatism and avant-garde provocation, situating housing as a site where play, perception, and collective life could be reimagined.