As designers experiment with social lounges, wellness spaces and other new antidotes to the post-pandemic slog that many people face as they’re called back in to work, Japanese architect Tomoaki Uno offers a more radical office amenity: a miniature forest.

One of his latest projects in suburban Nagoya, Japan, aligns 15 tree trunks in five neat rows (apart from one off-grid outlier) throughout a 120-square-metre, concrete-framed office. Filling the room from floor to ceiling, the indoor woodland encourages the mind to roam and dream big. “I like to make architecture that cannot easily be explained in words,” says Uno.

Since opening his Nagoya-based practice in 1990, the architect has steadily been building a reputation for his unusual residences — including one that he designed a few years ago for a local entrepreneur, Kazunori Ota, who runs a clothing import business. When it came time to relocate his office last year, Ota was eager to work with Uno again. Apart from a ballpark budget, he gave the architect free rein.

“I always wanted to work with tree trunks,” says Uno of the surreal concept he came up with. “And it was actually very affordable.” Sourced from the mountainous Yoshino region of Nara — a nearby area known for its commercial timber growth — each of the cedars that he procured is about 60 centimetres in diameter. “In the end, all I needed to think about was the distance between trunks,” Uno says.

Installing the trees was the real feat, requiring a complex system
of pulleys and ropes managed by Yasutoshi Sakurai, a gardener and frequent collaborator of Uno’s. Each one was then fixed into place using air-compressed recycled cement debris, which creates a rough, uneven floor that adds to the office’s raw identity. Otherwise, Uno kept the space sparse: just a small kitchen, a washroom, and a lone desk and swivel chair for Ota, who works alone.

That said, the entrepreneur (who previously studied art in Germany) is eager to make his space into a true community destination by promoting art and design through events and exhibitions. (One recent gathering drew both Uno himself and Akira Minagawa, the designer behind the cult fashion label Minä Perhonen.) As a welcome escape from the real world, the office leads the way for a broader shift from corporate sameness to spiritual enlightenment.