Boltun Headquarters

Pub Time:2019-11-06 10:44:43

The 115.8 m2 site sits along a busy industrial street, and the program was to rebuild the existing steel structured warehouse / office building.
Being adjacent to a wide street, the advantages of this site were accessibility with an ease of loading and unloading, quantity and size wise, the merchandize they deal in and the site also being a corner site, the building would stand out from the surroundings. On the other hand, the disadvantages were the continuous noise during the day, together with the tremors caused by heavy traffic and also the extremely week ground strength.
Creation through Collaboration

In order to lower the building-cost I considered using wood structure and steel structure in hope of making the building lighter to correspond to the weak ground conditions. But after some studies, I found out that these options, although lighter, did not make much of a difference cost-wise. All things considered, the final decision was made to go with concrete for its fireproof and soundproof benefits.
I was very confident that this project was feasible despite the limited budget because I was able to work with my collaborators right from the very first stages. I have worked with structural engineer Jun Sato for 15 years, and the contractor Shigeki Matsuoka, head of Homebuilder Co., Ltd., has been my collaborator for 25 years, building more than 80 projects together. I also knew most of the members working on site for a long period of time.

As soon as we decided to go with concrete, Mr. Matsuoka and I created a detailed list of more than 20 categories and allocated the total cost among them in order to decide on the appropriate materials and architectural details, which is a unique approach and quite the opposite process from normal procedures of design and estimation of cost.