we visited our friends kamuro and suzuno who run torafu, at their fudomae office in tokyo. they share a former two-level audio equipment warehouse, somewhat rare for downtown tokyo, with their friends, graphic and furniture designers. 

unlike china or singapore, where clients, being more conservative, would rather see an office that is neat and tidy, well-organised and well-staffed (think your typical black-dressed american architecture offices with cement floor, large tables and eames’ aluminium chairs), here torafu talk to their clients and collaborators in the midst of a creative typhoon of models, materials, drawings, equipment, plants, kitchenware, uncoordinated tables and chairs; a wild house of contemporary design practice and their natural habitat since their works range from quirky furniture, stage set design for a theatre group, fashion shop interiors, installations for group shows in art galleries, to architecture. 

in their office, we see them talking with graphic artist tokolo asao, whom they had collaborated in the shop interior design for street-wear label ‘inhabitant‘. here, they are seriously mulling over animal-like figures in the tribal-like interlocking graphics designed by tokolo, to be presented as part of the tokyo design tide show. over there, kamuro is taking photos of a prototype stool they are designing for mori-girl brand ‘mina perhonen‘ using off-the-peg wooden coat-hangers as legs.

ever since their first success with ‘template’ in claska hotel several years ago, we see them continuing their almost graphical mode of looking at the world; a manipulating things, transforming the normal by CAD or illustrator software techniques: what if we rotate this, or sink this down a bit, or copy this element, offset this, or enlarge this, or apply patterns or textures over these surfaces. in their most interesting project to date, the house in kohoku, we imagine them asking themselves: what if the house is made of four room-houses with four roofs; what if the roofs are stretched this way and that; what if they dip down to here or there; what if each room-house has one window each, some large some small, some up some down?