At just six feet wide, this incredibly narrow residence inserted into an alley in dense urban Tokyo is the latest example of Japanese architects thinking way outside the box when it comes to building new housing. The city is so developed, there’s almost no land left to build anything new, so they tend to get incredibly creative with even the oddest-shaped plots.

The four-story house by YUUA Architects and Associates extends about 36 feet into a former alley between two older buildings, and while the street-facing facade features floor-to-ceiling windows to maximize daylight and views, intimate spaces like bedrooms, bathrooms and main living areas are tucked into the back for privacy.

The minimalist interior design scheme includes floating platforms at various levels for a sense of openness, some of them made of metal mesh to let as much light pass through the house as possible. While such tiny residences are often kept bright white to create an illusion of extra space, YUUA makes an unusual choice with dark-painted walls.

There’s a semi-sunken basement for storage, and the first floor features a study area facing the street and a bedroom in the back. The third floor is comprised of an open-plan kitchen, living room and dining area, while the uppermost floor contains a bathroom, bedroom and terrace. Considering it’s only about as wide as an average adult male is tall, the house looks surprisingly livable.

The lot purchased by a homeowner might be seemingly impossible – clinging to a sheer cliff, squeezing into tight spaces, or consisting of an odd geometric shape – but by god, architects will find a solution. Whether by building up from a postage-stamp-sized property, zig-zagging a house between its neighbors or designing a home in the shape of a giant X, architecture firms have found ways to use seemingly undesirable spaces, leading to some very unusual and imaginative residences.

Twisting Zig-Zag House

To most people, it wouldn’t seem like there was actually room for a new house in this extremely narrow, oddly-shaped space between several other residences. But in Japan, every square inch counts. Alphaville architects came up with a novel approach: a zig-zagging house that might skim its neighbors by mere inches in some spots, but still manages to feel private inside thanks to very careful placement of windows and courtyards.

X-Shaped Cliffside House

How do you build a house on a sheer cliff that has views on every side, but still feels private, and is virtually invisible from the street? Cadaval & Solá-Morales architects created a two-story, X-shaped residence that clings to the cliff, with the roof functioning as a driveway and terrace. Each side of the home’s edge gets its own sweeping view of Barcelona without facing any of the neighbors. Incisions at the top and bottom of the ‘X’ let in light while maintaining that privacy.

Super-Skinny Cliff-Hugging House

The slightest wedge of a lot on a rocky cliff gave way to this narrow, sloping house by Shuhei Endo. The triangular lot was confined by a Y-shaped intersection and several other residences, and gets as narrow as 5 feet at some points. Tucking the home beside the retaining wall anchors it, and a narrow space between the wall and the home provides a light-filled, private outdoor space with architectural interest.

Oceanfront Cabin on Stilts

The strip of land this oceanfront cabin is built upon is hardly larger than a parking spot. But owner of that land wanted Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects to create a relaxing weekend getaway overlooking Sagami Bay, with views of Mount Fuji in the distance. The result is ‘Window House,’ a slim residence built on steel poles to protect it from storm surges and enable those stunning views. The interior features staggered lofts accessible by stairs and ladders.

Spite House Built on Pie-Shaped Lot

The Seattle Spite House was built on a pie-shaped piece of land adjacent to a larger home, and gets so narrow at one end that it’s hard to open the oven door all the way. The story goes that it was built in 1925 out of spite because the tiny, odd-shaped lot was all that was given to a wife in a contentious divorce, and she was determined to make the most of it. The home sold for nearly $400K in 2013.

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No Lot Too Challenging 13 Ingenious Odd Shaped Houses

There are all kinds of houses designed to showcase your prized luxury vehicle or custom cruiser, but few can boast so blatant a mechanism to quite literally put your sports car on a pedestal.

Tucked into a hillside, the main house sits below the street level at which you drive up and enter, leaving only a driveway, walkway and deck visible from above … until, that is, you jack up your car collection two more levels into the air.

To be fair, this unusual architectural solution was designed by Atelier K (images by Kazushi Hirano) not to showcase the vehicles as such, but to simply make room for the owner’s Porsche, Ferrari and Honda on a narrow lot where a three-car garage or driveway was simply never going to work.

Inside, modern simplicity and regional minimalism influence the interiors within the house, which hugs and runs along the steep hill behind it. The result is a series of cozy, house-scaled rooms more practical and conventional.

Still, back up above, one has to imagine that at least from time to time it is tempting to hop in the top-stacked vehicle, push the button and ride up a few more meters for an even more amazing view of the Japanese city sprawled out below.

This is what creative design is all about: taking a familiar typology and turning (or twisting) it around … not merely to show off something new and unique, but to critically respond and adapt to conditions of site and context.

BIG is a Danish firm with a sizable vision for this new 500-foot structure, in collaboration with local architect James Cheng, which will be the fourth largest skyscraper in Vancouver when completed.

Set atop a mixed-use podium, the main tower portion seems to have a sizable section carved out of it, a physical void placed in visual deference to adjacent thoroughfares, sunlight access and lines of sight, while creating the effect of near structural impossibility from key angles of view.

The plinth portion below carefully considers the needs of pedestrians and feel of the building on the street, while the form and outline of the building above is planned with careful respect for the surrounding skyline.

“The Beach and Howe tower is a contemporary descendant of the Flatiron Building in New York City – reclaiming the lost spaces for living as the tower escapes the noise and traffic at its base,” says Bjarke Ingels, founding partner of BIG. “In the tradition of Flatiron, Beach and Howe’s architecture is not the result of formal excess or architectural idiosyncrasies, but rather a child of its circumstances: the trisected site and the concerns for neighboring buildings and park spaces.”

When land is expensive or in short supply – or both, as is the case in Japan’s major metropolises – smart real estate developers don’t get down, they look up. These 20 tall thin Japanese buildings show what happens when builders shoot stories upwards to get the most bang for their yen.

(images via: Mike’s Blender)
Even after two decades of economic stagnation and the collapse of a formidable stock market and real estate bubble, Tokyo remains one of the most expensive places on Earth for developers to build in. The apartment building above is typical of those constructed in the “good old days”, when building thin was an ideal way to fatten one’s bank account.

(images via: Totonko)
When Tokyo’s bubble burst at the end of the 1980s, building thin remained in fashion but for very different reasons, notably the need for developers to get the highest possible ROI in a buyer’s market. The design for a modern apartment building conceived by Mitsutomo Matsunami is a marvel of simplicity and minimalism: though seven stories tall and offering 10 apartments of varying sizes, the building’s ground footprint is just 1,200 square feet.

(images via: Yukichika World)
When is thin TOO thin? That depends on your point of view. Take this building in Nagasaki. Viewed face-on, it looks rather normal; wider than it is tall and with an architecturally interesting pyramidal peak on its roof.

(image via: Sergio In Nagasaki)
Step around to the side, however, and… whoa! Unless the building operates using the same space-expanding engine as Doctor Who’s Tardis, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could function normally once they entered. And yet, the author of the blog that describes this splendid splinter states that there’s a Chinese restaurant inside, on the ground floor!

(image via: Joseph Tame)
If you live in a modern American suburban home, more than likely your front lawn is divided into a larger main expanse plus, after the sidewalk cuts through, a small area that continues on to meet the street. The post-sidewalk slice isn’t useful for much, maybe the City will plant a tree there but that’s about it. Not so in the Ushigome district of Kisarazu City in Japan’s Chiba prefecture, where they use that small space to build apartments on.

(image via: Google Maps – Japan)
The semicircular balconies are a cool feature, as they offer a 180-degree view for claustrophobics… who likely wouldn’t set foot in this building even if they were being chased by flaming wolves.

(images via: M.Terada, Jimgris and N@O)
Here are a few more apartment blocks and individual houses in built-up, urban areas of Japan. In many cases, the size of the footprints chosen by developers aren’t dictated wholly by the presence of existing buildings – in those shown above, there appears to be sufficient space to construct what most would consider to be a normal building. For reasons yet undisclosed, the developers of the structures above preferred to stay anorexically slim.

(images via: Izismile and Brad Templeton)
Downtown districts of Japan’s larger cities are where you’ll find a host of slim towers, all appearing to compete for the same small section of real estate. It’s been commented that if Godzilla really does exist and decides to go on a rampage, he’ll have a grand old time playing dominoes with Japanese skylines.

(images via: Whooba and Chipple)
The two thin Tokyo buildings above show that it’s possible to look thin AND look good… at least, look different. The structure on the left saves interior space by mounting its staircase – a 10-story spiral staircase – on the exterior. I’m guess the penthouse isn’t the most expensive unit here. On the right we have a building that aims to look like it belongs in Paris but actually fits in better on a street in Rock Ridge… not the real Blazing Saddles town, the fake one made of plywood storefronts.

(images via: M.Terada)
Photographer M. Terada has posted a set of images taken of so-called “Pancake House” or “Kamenori (razor) House” buildings in the Osaka area. One of the more striking is shown above left, and appears to be a restaurant cheekily named “Try Angle”.

(images via: M.Terada)
Just like the cars of the Fabulous Fifties compared with those of today, a building can be extremely thin on the outside yet seem comfortable on the inside due to clever, ergonomic design. These buildings have got space to spare where it’s needed most – after all, our bodies aren’t shaped like squares, are they?

(image via: Bouncing Red Ball)
Umm, did someone say “ergonomics”? Maybe that just goes for the expensive, designer slim buildings. The run-of-the-mill, workaday thin buildings have to cut corners in areas some might feel are, well, a little too close for comfort.

(image via: 1987porsche944)
Here’s a real treat for the thin building fan: a cluster of slim structures seemingly leaning on each other for support near Hamamatsucho Station in Tokyo. According to the photographer, the brownish-red building on the right houses an eyewear shop on the ground floor and a chiropractic clinic one floor up. The width of the building on the inside is about 2.5 meters or about 7.5 feet, not exactly luxurious but livable assuming there’s decent length to go with it. The thin white building on the left is a Capsule Hotel – the room there make those in the eyewear building seem positively spacious.

(images via: Dark Roasted Blend)
Just another “House in Tokyo”? That’s what this design by the Atelier Tekuto architecture studio seeks to define in this exquisite, cathedral-like structure. The most salient feature of this design study is the rear entrance where a stepladder unfolds to the ground as in some futuristic spaceship.

(images via: Mike’s Blender)
So lonely… the building above stands alone and at the mercy of earthquakes, typhoons or volcanic eruptions. Good thing Japan never gets any of those… oh, wait. It does seem strange that so many tall thin buildings have been built – and are STILL being built – in a country so often visited by nature’s more violent phenomena.

(images via: WWU Geo-hazard Index and Kyoto U)
Building codes are indeed more strict in Japan but how can a building that looks like it’ll fold up like a cheap circus tent at the mere rumor of a typhoon meet some of the toughest rules & regulations in the world? Then again, what are the works of man compared to the immeasurable power of nature? As the rows of not-so-narrow apartment blocks capsized during the 1964 Niigata Earthquake so obviously indicate, not a whole lot.