An inner forest. Meito Arts Association Office by Tomoaki Uno Architects

Named Forest Office, the small workspace designed by Tomoaki Uno was commissioned by a client, without specific requirements, who simply requested that "something interesting" be created within his office space.

The office has been stripped down to its bare concrete walls. A small kitchen unit has been placed on one side of the entrance, and a toilet cubicle on another.

One-half of the spacious office, which is located on the ground floor of the building, contains a lone desk and a chair for Kazunori Ota, a young entrepreneur who has a business importing clothing. Ota works alone.

Using the concept of rows of large trees, Uno decided to start to just remove the bark from the logs and place them on a regular grid. However, since the tree trunks no were the same shape, it was impossible to position them in a cartesian way, and even, one of the trunks did not fit in its intended place, and was slightly out of line. The grid changed to an unplanned layout.

"We couldn’t fit that one in but I didn’t want to waste it, so we just found a random place for it in between the others," Uno says. Its placement makes the room feel more like a real forest, rather than what it is: an architect-designed office space.


Meito Arts Association Office by Tomoaki Uno Architects. Photography by Edmund Sumner.


Meito Arts Association Office by Tomoaki Uno Architects. Photography by Edmund Sumner.

Each tree trunk was procured from a timber yard in Yoshino, a mountainous region south of Nara for 80,000 yen, roughly €529 each, and was lifted upright using pulleys and ropes. The uneven floor and its roughness recall the irregularity of nature. Alive nature appears also in the sound caused by the raw tree trunks, as they dry out. "I wasn’t prepared for the loud crackling sound coming out of these tree trunks when I first moved into the office," Ota recalls. However, the sound of new wood crackling was frequently heard in traditional Minka houses as if they were alive.

Tomoaki Uno is the son of a plasterer and grew up surrounded by craftspeople, learning to work intuitively: ‘Artisans can’t really hide behind their work. The end result will tell you all you need to know about them.’  He is reluctant to theoretical discourses. You never do mockups or visualizations at the start of your work, so the question is obvious, how do you communicate your ideas to your clients? his answer is only possible in a culture like Japan, "I promise all my clients that I will come personally if something doesn't work and I will fix it."