Apartment in Hasunuma

The overlap of formality and non-formality
The site is located on a corner just off Nakasendo Road in the suburbs of Tokyo. In the surrounding area, shops and houses are densely built along the narrow shopping streets, and parking lots are scattered as vacant lots. Since the surrounding area is not considered to be a good living environment, we wanted to create an open space for residents in the site, and decided to consider a row house without common areas, with a policy of consolidating it into a compact volume to ensure external space, and considering that the COVID-19 pandemic occurred shortly after we began designing.
The required floor area and number of units made it difficult to adopt a simple row house format. Therefore, we decided to place two four-story buildings with semi-basements that contain four units at a distance, and connect them with a basement that houses one unit and a bridge on the roof. All units are the maisonette with combinations of 1st/2nd floor and 3rd/4th floor, and the entrances are concentrated on the 2nd and 3rd floors, making it a multi-story row house format.
The approach to each unit is via a stepped platform with an open sky above, so residents gather there, but each unit has its own entrance. It is a place where common and private overlap. The stepped platform is an architectural exterior, so it cannot be considered a tenement house in the strict sense of the word, as it does not have common areas.
Also, the two volumes are offset from one another, and each unit has openings in multiple directions, creating a good indoor environment. They are connected by a bridge to the platform, so they have an integrated architectural presence in the surrounding area, and cannot be considered purely separate buildings.
For example, how should we call the platform-like space mentioned above in this building? It is open space, but it is built up. It looks like a staircase landing, and also like a rooftop plaza. The space, which is an architectural form that simultaneously overlaps a certain form such as a separate building or tenement house with a shifted formlessness, is offset, so there is no accurate name for it at present. Since naming is a formality, this difficult-to-describe space may well be the beginning of an architecture free from institutions.