The Prolonged Entry Deadline for Architizer’s 2025 A+Product Awards is Friday, February twenty first. Get your model in entrance of the AEC trade’s most famous designers by submitting in the present day.
In the course of any metropolis, there’s that nook cafe. The one the place regulars sit by the window sipping from plain white mugs. It serves tea and occasional, perhaps a slice of sq. white toast on a very good day. Unashamedly, that’s all it cares to do. There’s no pop-up collab; there’s no poetry slam evening, only a respectable brew and the consolation of familiarity.
That is the essence of a single-purpose house — uncomplicated and unpretentious in its readability. Architects as soon as designed with this sort of assurance on a regular basis, shaping buildings for one factor, nothing extra, and completely nothing much less. A restaurant was a restaurant, a cinema for watching movies, and a practice station was merely for catching a practice.
Over time, although, architectural purity gave solution to flexibility, and adaptableness grew to become king. Buildings are anticipated to do double, typically triple obligation. A fitness center additionally needs to be a juice bar. A lodge have to be a social hub. A carpark higher have the ability to moonlight as an occasions venue. An area that serves just one operate is now thought-about a monetary threat, a planning failure, or an inefficient use of high-priced sq. footage.
But, some buildings refuse to entertain the concept of a Plan B. They’re designed so particularly, so exactly, that their function can’t be diluted. They don’t hedge their bets. They don’t try to be all issues to all folks. And in doing so, they turn into one thing fairly uncommon: a single-purpose house. A spot that can’t afford to be obscure and have to be intentional in each element, so refined in its execution that it doesn’t must justify itself by means of different makes use of. There may be an artwork to this sort of conviction, and the next seven initiatives present simply how distinctive areas might be after they aren’t being compelled to shape-shift.
Stand Up Udon Noodle
By sawa architects, Shibuya Metropolis, Japan
Jury Winner, Eating places (S <1000 sq ft), thirteenth Annual A+Awards
At simply 160 sq. toes (15 sq. meters), Stand Up Udon Noodle is outlined by a single arched counter that does the whole lot for the house. It divides, frames, and holds the eating necessities, together with lighting, condiments, chopsticks and tissues. The easy plaster end, blended with rice hulls, ties the design again to the noodles it serves in a means that’s easy and stylish.
There’s no lingering at this restaurant. There are not any cubicles and no compelled sense of environment. Stand Up Udon Noodle is constructed for consuming Udon and nothing else — and it gives the expertise masterfully.
KANGOL Headwear World Flagship Retailer
By WING DESIGN, Guangzhou, China
Kangol makes hats. Nothing else. No sneakers, no purses, no scent. Simply hats, because it has accomplished for practically a century. That sort of focus is uncommon in style, manufacturers normally unfold themselves throughout countless product strains.
Its flagship retailer in Guangzhou follows the identical philosophy. Black volcanic bricks give the outside weight, a nod to the normal masonry of the neighborhood, whereas inside, heat wooden and gentle lighting present an unfussy backdrop for the one factor that issues right here — the hats. Skylights pull mild down onto the shows and reinforce the sense that each element has been thought-about in service of the hero product. There are not any distractions or pointless gestures; only a retailer designed with the identical singular focus because the model itself.
Teshima Artwork Museum
By Ryue Nishizawa, Takamatsu, Japan
Images by Iwan Baan
Teshima Artwork Museum isn’t your common museum. To start out with, it has solely ever displayed one paintings. A skinny concrete shell resting within the hills of Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Matrix, an set up by Rei Naito.
The house is totally open to the weather with two elliptical holes within the ceiling that pull in wind, rain, mild and sound. There is no such thing as a distraction, no added programming — not even a reception desk. There may be nothing to anchor the expertise past the expertise of the artwork, and that is precisely what makes the expertise so particular.
Tools Room
By RIOS, Austin, Texas
Images by Robert Gomez
Impressed by Tokyo’s jazz kissa, and tucked behind Music Lane, Tools Room in Austin Texas, is an area constructed for deep listening. It retains its interventions minimal. The concrete flooring are left untouched, furnishings is salvaged and repurposed, and the design leans on Austin’s native audio expertise to create one thing that feels uncooked, intentional and particular.
A curved acoustic felt wall absorbs and shapes the sound, whereas a hemlock bar and customized DJ sales space work nicely. The design treats information and tools as a part of the house there, not for adornment however to be interacted with and loved. Seating shifts relying on the evening however the expertise stays the identical. The whole lot is tuned towards listening, each element calibrated to let the music take up as a lot house because it wants.
Audemars Piguet Watch Manufacture
By Kunik de Morsier architectes, Le Locle, Switzerland
Images by Iwan Baan
Manufacturing is usually the place we see sole function areas at their most spectacular. The whole lot inside this constructing exists for the making of watches. The obsessive, methodical technique of assembling time itself.
The Audemars Piguet Watch Manufacture is a completely linked system, the place each stage of manufacturing occurs in an area designed solely for its operate. North-facing workshops are bathed in regular, oblique mild, creating the proper situations for microscopic element work, whereas administration sits to the south. On the heart, the Piazza acts as some extent of change between disciplines — an vital level as watchmaking isn’t a set of unbiased duties.
That is what a single-purpose house seems to be like at its most refined, a constructing so particular to its operate that nothing about it may very well be used for anything.
Omakase Xi
By UN-GROUP, Shanghai, China
Images by Songkai Liu
There is just one means in, and a technique ahead. A slender, unlit hall lined with burnt cedar pulls guests inside. A single shoji window provides a glimpse of obsidian that hovers above water, a picture designed to not be understood, however to gradual visitors down, permitting them to benefit from the journey. Then, the house opens up right into a gentle, vibrant cypress clad house with a single counter. There are not any tables, no different seating, nothing to interrupt the main target between chef and visitor.
Omakase as a observe doesn’t accommodate preferences and the structure right here, just like the meal, follows a strict sequence, one that doesn’t bend, adapt or make room for anything.
Ullem Chapel
By ASK Studio, Moravia, Iowa
Images by Cameron Campbell at Built-in Studio
Constructed on a family-owned farm, Ullem Chapel is a singular house for contemplation that has been stripped to its absolute core values. It provides no sermon, no denomination and no actual operate past quiet commentary and reflection. The construction itself is an train in restraint with horizontal cribbing boards and simplified gothic arches to create a kind that’s caught between the normal languages of agriculture and religion. It doesn’t fairly shelter. It doesn’t collect. It doesn’t serve. It exists solely to focus the thoughts.
An area can’t be extra singular than this, a chapel that gives nothing however the act of being current.
The Prolonged Entry Deadline for Architizer’s 2025 A+Product Awards is Friday, February twenty first. Get your model in entrance of the AEC trade’s most famous designers by submitting in the present day.
