Renovation projects that are underway without sufficient budget are somewhat like excavation work. We can't just leave it as it is, but we have to decide whether to scrape off the surface layer with its inexplicable charm or to protect it with some kind of treatment. I carefully sorted them out so as not to make a mistake between the two choices. Especially in a tenant office like the one in this case, where no specific users are expected, almost all the resources will be devoted to the two choices on the surface.

This office, a few minutes walk from Iidabashi station, had a surface layer of yellowed booths in the president's office, unplanned built-in shelves, partially applied decorative tiles, wood sheet flooring of different types pieced together, cracked glass windows, sooty asbestos-absorbent ceilings, and skirting boards of different heights. With a budget of about one million yen, it was not possible to go back to the skeleton and rebuild from scratch, so we proceeded with the design by determining the parts that needed to be "removed" and the parts that needed to be "used".

As a result, the president's office booth was dismantled, leaving behind tiles and mismatched shelves, the central part of the floor was dismantled, leaving the periphery intact, and the wood sheets used for finishing were recovered from the scraped areas and rearranged to eliminate the gaps. All the ceilings were dismantled, but the lighting was placed as if it were hatching on the former ceiling surface, symbolically "using" the ceiling. The two layers make up the whole, hiding and revealing each other without any clear rules.