Project Name: Tokyo Ballet House

Location: Toshima, Tokyo, Japan

Design Team: Kenta SANO and Associates, Architects

Area: 274.98 m²

Year: 2024

Photography: Motoharu Yagi

Design Features: Japanese architecture studio Kenta SANO and Associates, Architects has completed a combined ballet school and residence in the Toshima ward of Tokyo, where the dense layering of the city becomes the audience to an elevated stage.

Situated near Rikugien, one of Edo's two great historic gardens, the building occupies a long-established residential neighbourhood where close-knit community bonds persist into contemporary life. Dance studios of any kind tend to turn inward, demanding privacy and independence from the street. Rather than accept this condition, Kenta SANO and Associates, Architects reframed it as an architectural problem worth solving: how to mediate the relationship between city, residence, and studio.

At ground level, a terrace sunken 300 millimetres below street grade is encircled by planted greenery, creating an open threshold between the building and its neighbours. Above, the studio occupies the fullest footprint the site permits, with a clear floor-to-ceiling height of 4.2 metres to accommodate the full range of movement that ballet demands. The floor is lifted clear of the ground, with ancillary studio functions and a garage tucked beneath, and a compact penthouse residence stacked above. The volumetric offsets between these stacked masses carve out sheltered eaves and terraces threaded with abundant planting.

The defining gesture is theatrical. Taking the client's long-standing commitment to public performance as its cue, the architects conceived the northern glazed opening as a proscenium arch, a textile curtain as the stage drape, and the city beyond as the auditorium. The garage ceiling height was deliberately minimised to bring the studio floor close to road level, collapsing the distance between performer and street.

A visiting structural engineer once remarked that the view from inside was quintessentially Tokyo, a dense gradient of towers, mid-rises and houses layered into the urban horizon. That continuity with the city gave the project its name.

Design Team: Founded in 2015 by Kenta Sano, a Tokyo-born architect who trained at Waseda University and Yokohama National University before spending eleven years at Toyo Ito and Associates, Kenta SANO and Associates, Architects is a Tokyo-based practice working across residential, hospitality, cultural, and urban typologies.

The firm operates through a collaborative, dialogue-driven process, engaging clients, structural and environmental engineers, lighting designers, and contractors as co-authors of each project rather than consultants at the periphery. This network-based methodology consistently produces work that is spatially precise, materially considered, and deeply embedded in its urban and ecological context.

Central to the practice's ethos is the pursuit of sensuous, human-scaled environments that dissolve boundaries between interior space and the natural world, while remaining formally inventive and programmatically rigorous. The studio holds a particular commitment to performance-oriented public projects and mixed-use residential architecture.

The current studio team is led by Kenta Sano as Principal and CEO, with Sakutaro Kakehashi serving as Director. The team also includes designers Chie Lin, Sylvester Ch'ng Ying, and Taishi Jogan. The firm has received the Good Design Award on three separate occasions, in 2020, and twice in 2024.