発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

← Hakken 週ごとのアーカイブ

The Nordroom

An Industrial Glass Wall Turns a Studio into a One-Bedroom Apartment

10月8日

New owners come and go in this apartment. This is the third time the home has been put on the market in four years, and this time, the owners turned the studio into a one-bedroom apartment.

The Nordroomで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

An Industrial Glass Wall Turns a Studio into a One-Bedroom Apartment

The Nordroomの他の記事

A Round Dining Room in a Turn-of-the-Century Family Apartment The Nordroom

Original Marble and Oak Parquet in a 1940s Stockholm Apartment The Nordroom

Why Are the Colors of the Year 2027 So Boring? And What Can You Use Instead The Nordroom

A Modern Loft Conversion and Classic 1920s Elements in an Oslo Apartment The Nordroom

C2 Paint’s Color of the Year 2027 Is Pueblo, a Lovely Shade Between Pink and Terracotta The Nordroom

Period Features and a Harmonious Color Palette in an 1890s Stockholm Apartment The Nordroom