Attic light: through the careful distortion of familiar forms, Jun Aoki's latest Tokyo house makes the ordinary extraordinary.

There is a tendency among European architects to experiment with varying silhouettes. In the UK one thinks of the emerging work of Caruso St John and Sergison Bates, while more widely across continental Europe buildings by Studio Granda (AR July 1992), Gigon + Guyer (AR June 2004), and Herzog & de Meuron (AR August 2003) have derived new, distinctive and highly specific forms that have avoided the lure of bling and blob. Since the mid 1990s, in opposition to High Tech and POMO, traditional pitch roof forms and restrained Swiss boxes began to morph in response to site and programme. Articulated in detail with intricate tectonics, and through formal distortion--torsion and twists, architectural nip and tuck--typologies slowly evolved. While space and material remained key considerations, it was the search for form that prevailed as the main concern, and with a pulled vector here, an elongated ridge there, exaggerated forms emerged. Strangely familiar, yet dramatically new, a form of abstract post-modernism brought a new play on architectural simile--'it's like a barn, an oast house, but with a twist'. In Japan, a similar tendency is emerging.

With earthquake regulations enforcing a minimum 500mm gap between adjacent properties, densely packed urban neighbourhoods have made the detached home one of the country's most widespread architectural types, considered by many architects to be one of Japan's cultural treasures. So it is no surprise that an emerging generation of architects is bringing new interest to this area of specialism, with architects such as Yoshiharu Tsukamoto carrying out extensive research into the rhetoric and spatial composition of postwar housing. In this field, Jun Aoki is also a serious contributor, shown here with G House, a contemporary abstraction of a traditional timber-framed pitched-roof detached house. Situated in a residential district of central Tokyo, G House is a rendered house set on top of a reinforced-concrete podium. With internal spaces conforming to this formal division, living, dining and entertaining spaces are contained within the concrete podium, with attic bedrooms above. With no distinction between wall and roof, the distorted attic form could certainly be described as a contrived, compelling object, (see Peter Buchanan, AR August 2005), not dissimilar in form to Prada's angular prism (AR August 2003). Here, however, justification for the derivation of form is attributed to traditional formal types and to specific site constraints, with the subtle inflections in plan reflecting the tapering plot, and a recognition of adjacent building heights producing dramatic distortions in elevation. Furthermore, adhering to good old-fashioned Modernist truth-to-form, the internal volume reflects the external form, with lofty voids, passageways and bedrooms creating a complex series of interlocking spaces. The spatial complexity resonates externally, with an apparently random arrangement of timber sash windows that sit proud of the rendered surface, creating a pattern that subverts any recognition of floor levels, shifts our perception of scale, and increases the form's sculptural significance. The resultant form is bold and distinctive and is further modelled by a re-entrant corner cutout, set directly above the sunken entrance court.

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Internally the passage of light has been carefully orchestrated with the attic form serving as an enormous skylight for the podium beneath. Two voids help achieve this; a central double-height atrium that serves as the focus of the house connecting living spaces with a mezzanine work study, and more curiously a horizontal void, 770mm high, that articulates the structural division between concrete basement and timber frame; a continuously expressed interstitial datum that lies coincident with the re-entrant cutout. Light fills the spaces, and set against the cool interiors that are dominated by white walls, timber soffits and concrete structure, Aoki's interest in decorative ornamentation (most overtly expressed in his work for Louis Vuitton, AR November 2004) is also evident, demonstrating some of his more quirky influences. These include the use of silk and lace in bedroom curtains, traditionally used to make kimonos, and flock wallpaper, as featured in George Cukor's 1964 film My Fair Lady; the wallpaper being applied with restraint to feature walls in the living room, easily changeable, he explains, as tastes change.

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Built to a high specification, the budget of this house represented an equal split between land and construction, with the relatively high construction costs funding the big concrete basement, which has a large cellar and fine finishes throughout.