This weekend, I kind of stumbled into a rabbit hole of Japanese architecture. Or maybe it’s more like an ant farm? It started when I wanted to see what Jun Aoki was up to, and ended when I found these incredible models by Ikimono Architects. Honestly, I’m not even sure how I arrived at the firm’s website; between Jun Aoki and Ikimono Architects, it’s all a blur of white spaces and asymmetrical windows.

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Jun Aoki is probably best known (at least in the States) for his designs of Louis Vuitton retail spaces. For over a decade he’s been working on retail projects for the brand in prestigious locations like 5th Avenue, where he wrapped the flagship retail space in a kinetic moiré pattern. Like many of his projects the predominate color of the space and it’s ghostly skin is white. So I was surprised that when I went to the firm’s website and looked at projects “In Progress” and I was greeted by diagrams as colorful as a candy shelf.

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Earlier this week, Dezeen ran a story about a clean and modern house; a house where the living spaces cantilevered off of stacked bedrooms like a grown-up, contemporary treehouse. The views from the so-called Tower House are incredible and the architects responsible for the projects are the ones at Gluck+. I poked around the firm’s website a bit and found that the Tower House has a sort of cousin built in the New York: the Vertical Library. Although one house is rural and the other urban, both are organized around something simple and humble: a staircase. More than just circulation, the stairs become exciting and dynamic places in these projects. In the city, the stair climbs a four-story bookshelf, and in the trees, the stair is painted bright yellow.

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