A room is a decision about how you want to be tired at the end of the day.

I live in forty-eight square metres in Tokyo with one good chair and far too many bowls, so I have had to mean that. I trained as an architect and left to write, which my teachers took badly. Uchi (内) means inside, and it means home: the room you come back to. The palette comes after the tiredness. So does the name on the lamp.

This is where I keep what the world's rooms are doing. More than a hundred sources, read in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English: an apartment in Seoul, a house outside Taipei, a Copenhagen showroom seen from here rather than from Denmark. East first, because east is where I am sitting.

Each story is a headline, an excerpt of a few lines, one photograph and a link to whoever did the work. We never reprint the piece, and the photograph belongs to the person who took it. When a room was written up in Korean or Italian it stays in Korean or Italian here; the link takes you to the writer's own words.

I am not trying to be complete. I am trying to notice.

— Mio Tachibana, Tokyo

← Uchi Archive

Spoon & TamagoJapan

Tadao Ando Designed & Donated a Floating Library that Delivers Books to Children

09.16

Cutting through the white-capped waves of the Seto Inland Sea is a one-of-kind “floating library”. This is Hon no Mori-go (ほんのもり号) created to give children living on remote islands the opportunity to…

Architecture tadao ando

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Tadao Ando Designed & Donated a Floating Library that Delivers Books to Children

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