A home to keep you young, or insane
If you're into wild architecture, check out 三鷹天命反転住宅 (the "Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka"). I learned about this housing when my brother sent me a link to this old Newsweek story. As that article says:
Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall.
All of this makes the place sound not at all like something that should be advertised as "in memory of Helen Keller." You'd think she would want a simple, regular layout around which to find her way. Still, the place does look cool, in a Dr. Seuss sort of way.
The apartment building is near my place, so I will swing by one of these days and take pictures of my own. (If you were a Bochi kid, then you'll understand when I tell you that it's on the six-lane, across the street from the gas station near the back gate of ICU.) Not exactly handy to the train lines, and that is one noisy road to live on . . . All this for ¥90 million? Yeah, I'll probably pass on these units, even if one of them does belong to the Buddhist nun and author Setouchi Jakuchô. Perhaps the price doesn't seem so high to the elderly when they consider that architect Arakawa Shûsaku promises the wildly unpredictable apartment "makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you'll live better, longer and even forever."
