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. Around seventy sources, read in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, French 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

Designboom

the planet is in the room: mutualism by design

10.22

Four years ago, in the Arsenale, I stood with French artist Marguerite Humeau in front of three beings she had named after ocean currents, and nobody could agree on what they were.

Read at Designboom ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

the planet is in the room: mutualism by design

More from Designboom on Uchi

‘fungi are still going to be here’: how mushrooms inspire new ways of thinking about nature Designboom

architecture for extinction: where does nature go when its habitat disappears? Designboom

‘we are all marine animals, we just forgot’: photographer enzo barracco at the ocean&climate village Designboom

studio thusthat turns the rusty-red waste of aluminum production into delicate ceramics Designboom