Lei Wa Lakom Library is the second realized project within the Parallel Gives program, led by Architect Mai Al Busairi- Kuwait, demonstrating how modest, socially driven architecture can create enduring cultural and educational impact through climate-responsive and context-aware design.
Mugok is not a place that invites escape from everyday life through temporary retreat. Rather, it is an architecture that guides one to recover a renewed attitude within the everyday. Here, architecture does not dominate the subject—the user, the human—but instead settles quietly as a background for being. Space is constructed through a language of restraint rather than display, and it is precisely this restraint that gives rise to a profound inner resonance. Within this quietude, the user regains their center and re-establishes a relationship with the world.
This renovation transforms a former residence into a restaurant while preserving traces of its residential use accumulated over time. In the renovation of existing architecture, the act of design is always situated between the past and the future. Unlike new construction, such projects already contain an accumulation of time, requiring the designer to engage in dialogue with the memory of the space. Beyond physical information such as changes in form, materials, and spatial configuration, carefully reading the traces of everyday life once lived there holds significant meaning when envisioning a new spatial reality.
1. Opening Hook – Haniyasu House is a two-family residence that reconnects living and making through an architecture shaped by earth, craft, and shared daily life.
This residence is located in a residential area of Shimizu Ward, Shizuoka City. Low-rise houses and a three-story office building, with an elementary school across the road to the south, surround the site. The plan places an L-shaped building at the site’s center, with a parking lot facing the southern road and a garden to the north. A large roof spanning both interior and exterior spaces was designed to envelop the entire site, aiming to create expansive and deep spatial qualities. The garden functions as an open “blank space” accessible to the neighborhood, guiding light and wind toward the surrounding homes.
My Front Yard is a design project that redefines the traditional retail experience by prioritizing open-air circulation, communal “neighborhood” planning, and an unifying architectural language. Situated in front of a hillside in Phuket, the project avoids the monolithic “big box” retail approach, instead opting for a cluster of decentralized, low-rise pavilions and leisure spaces that invite curiosity and exploration.
The house is a characteristic expression of the firm’s design philosophy, marked by simplicity and modesty in the use of materials, textures, finishes, and furnishings. Positioned as a largely linear volume on an elevated site, the form refrains from overpowering its context. Instead of exploiting the site’s height advantage over the surrounding terrain, the architecture integrates a laterite wall that functions both as a compound wall and the main building skin along the eastern elevation. This wall stretches across the larger volume that houses the common areas.
This renovation project reinterprets a 60-year-old house in Hakone by transforming layers of enclosure—ranging from valley-scale topography to interior living spaces—into a continuous spatial experience.
The Operations and Maintenance Building is north of Hub 08, which is the gateway to the northern side of the park. The landscape concept for the Operations and Maintenance building is to provide a green aspect that carries on from the green roof of Hub 08 and conceals the back-of-house delivery areas and parking from view. The green facade of the outer building forms three bands of green that undulate along the primary access road and provide a pleasant edge to an otherwise industrial use.
The Operations and Maintenance Building is north of Hub 08, which is the gateway to the northern side of the park. The landscape concept for the Operations and Maintenance building is to provide a green aspect that carries on from the green roof of Hub 08 and conceals the back-of-house delivery areas and parking from view. The green facade of the outer building forms three bands of green that undulate along the primary access road and provide a pleasant edge to an otherwise industrial use.
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