Project Name: LiSH TAKANAWA GATEWAY Link Scholars' Hub Studio1

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Design Team: OnDesign Partners

Total Floor Area: 2,865 m² (6F: 1,119.55 m², 7F: 1,745.45 m²)

Completion: April 2025

Photography: Koichi Torimura

Design Features:

Project Tokyo-based architecture studio On Design has completed the interior of LiSH Studio1, an incubation facility in the city's Minato Ward that uses a carefully choreographed sequence of hanging walls, waist-high partitions, and ceiling treatments to orchestrate encounters between users while facilitating constant movement and lingering.

Occupying the sixth and seventh floors of THE LINKPILLAR 1 NORTH building in the Takanawa Gateway development, the 2,865-square-metre facility embodies a spatial gradient that transitions seamlessly from public to private realms. The design team conceived three distinct zones that flow into one another: TERMINAL on the sixth floor serves as the facility's entrance where people and information intersect, while the seventh floor houses SQUARE, a coworking space where activity congregates, and TOWN, a constellation of home offices that foster belonging.

The project's defining feature lies in its architectural elements that simultaneously delineate and connect spaces. Rather than relying on conventional full-height partitions, On Design deployed hanging walls and waist-high barriers to create fluid circulation routes and territorial definition without severing visual connections. This strategy allows sight lines to traverse multiple zones, enabling users to observe activity elsewhere and sparking spontaneous interactions. The architects carefully studied how people constantly "move" and "linger", using hanging walls, waist-high walls, and ceiling treatments to create circulation routes and territories, aiming to generate spaces where encounters are born.

Material choices reinforce the public-to-private progression. TERMINAL employs metal finishes and subdued tones punctuated by accent-colored furniture, creating an energetic atmosphere suited to chance encounters. To enable users to encounter new people and information, waist-high walls and hanging walls connect spaces, while furniture without directional orientation allows sight lines and circulation paths to change constantly. The use of metal materials and subdued tones, interspersed with accent-colored furniture, creates a space that conveys the vibrancy of human activity.

SQUARE introduces warmer, brighter materials with curved furniture and walls that establish intimate enclosures while maintaining visual permeability to adjacent areas and an outdoor terrace. This coworking space features furniture, hanging walls, and waist-high walls that trace gentle curves, forming highly enclosed territories. It is a space that balances territorial definition with visual openness, where users' activities are easily visible, enabling casual conversation and interaction. Bright and warm materials create a place where one can behave freely, like a plaza continuous with the exterior terrace.

TOWN features the greatest material diversity, with ribbed panels, tiles, and timber generating visual richness and ensuring that each home office, positioned at varying angles to eliminate dead ends, offers distinct perspectives. TOWN houses corporate home offices. Each home office is positioned at different angles, creating a spatial composition without dead ends. The adjacent free space, surrounded by lowered ceilings and diverse materials and furniture, becomes a gathering place for people while allowing individuals to find their preferred spots. The use of various materials and colors such as ribbed panels, tiles, and timber generates visual enjoyment, creating diverse scenery in views while walking and vistas from within offices.

Furthermore, by carefully varying material selection and placement, the design creates a range of spatial options according to group size and purpose, producing diverse places that match individual preferences and comfort levels. This deliberate fragmentation of materials and careful manipulation of architectural thresholds produces an environment where users can constantly discover preferred niches while remaining embedded in a larger network of activity and exchange.

Design Team Founded in 2003 and led by principal architect Tsukasa Nishida, OnDesign Partners has established itself as one of Japan's most innovative architectural practices, operating from its Yokohama headquarters. The firm's distinctive approach centers on exploring diverse architectural "languages" derived from organic movements of creating, learning, opening, testing, and living, generating what they term "collective knowledge" through the intersection of these varied dialects.

OnDesign's practice spans multiple scales, from intimate residential interventions to comprehensive urban regeneration projects and institutional commissions. Their portfolio demonstrates particular strength in community-oriented design, evidenced by award-winning projects such as the Yokohama Apartment, which garnered the JIA Newcomer Award in 2012, and the Kanagawa University International Student Dormitory, recipient of the Good Design Best 100 and Japan Spatial Design Award Gold Prize in 2020. The interior design team for the LiSH Studio1 project comprises Miki Nagahori, Masayuki Hamamoto, and Norihiro Nishioka, all core members of OnDesign. The project also brought together Taiji Fujimori Atelier for furniture design, Chiharu Ozawa for furniture selection, Mantle for lighting design, hokkyok for signage design, and SOLSO for landscape design, demonstrating comprehensive cross-disciplinary collaborative strength.

The firm's commitment to flattened hierarchies in thinking about people, cities, and architecture has yielded recognition across two decades, including the 2022 Yokohama Culture Award for Cultural Arts Encouragement and representation at the 2016 Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition. Their methodology emphasizes dialogue, whether with residents in urban contexts or inhabitants in residential projects, positioning architecture as a participatory medium that responds to and catalyzes human interaction.

OnDesign's design philosophy centers on organic "movements", exploring, designing, and continuously disseminating various "languages" such as "creating", "learning", "opening", "testing", and "living". Through the overlap of these languages (collective knowledge), the firm values thinking about "people" and "towns" and everything related to architecture in a flattened manner. This philosophy manifests in projects ranging from temporary community hubs to permanent cultural facilities, consistently prioritizing spatial generosity and programmatic flexibility.

The firm's design scope encompasses architectural design, supervision, operation planning, and urban planning, demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of architectural practice. Their portfolio includes not only architectural projects but also participation in broader architectural discourse through hosting various workshops and events, exploring the role of the built environment in shaping society. Through their interdisciplinary methodology, OnDesign integrates technical precision with conceptual rigor, producing work that demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of materiality, spatial organization, and environmental performance, believing in the transformative power of architecture as a tool for improving quality of life.