The "Architectural Lunch Box" jointly created by multiple architects will subvert your imagination of standard lunch boxes

Table of contents

Sumiyoshi townhouse

Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Art

Tokyo Apartment

Which building would you like to use as your lunch box?

A bento box is usually a box with a large space, allowing the bento preparer to sort and stack various ingredients one by one. Each area performs its own duties, and the delicious bento dishes are arranged and combined to create a delicious visual impression. The process of assembling lunch boxes is actually very similar to how architects design buildings. What content should be placed in this space, how to design stacking here, and how to put as much required content as possible in a limited space. So several designers worked together to design three bento boxes inspired by famous Japanese buildings or characteristic buildings. Although there are no actual products for sale, it is still a very interesting project.

Sumiyoshi townhouse

Sumiyoshi's Nagaya is a two-story residence located in Osaka. It is an early work of the famous architect Tadao Ando. This lunch box is designed by disassembling the entire second floor of the building into two long lunch boxes.

As can be seen more clearly from the cross-sectional view, the design of the lunch box uses different rooms in the living space as decorative compartments, leaving stairs in the middle. Although it seems like a waste of available space in the lunch box and requires long distance movement to the left and right to taste each dish, it is also a bit more interesting and allows people to savor each dish carefully.

Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Art

Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Art is a modern art museum located in Kanazawa City. It has also won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Architecture Biennale and has attracted much attention. Its architectural feature is a perfect circular plane configuration, and the entire space is divided into multiple exhibition rooms. The height and shape of each exhibition room are also different, which can accommodate various exhibitions.

There is no real front entrance, which is also one of the design features of this circular building. This bento box also continues this concept and is designed with a rotatable bottom. As the disc rotates, different dishes will be rotated in front of you, which will bring different bento scenes.

The boxes for storing vegetables are also decorated with rectangular transparent boxes of various shapes and sizes, forming different light and shadow projections and increasing the richness of the visual effect. Translate the design concept of the building itself into interesting lunch box containers.

Tokyo Apartment

"Tokyo Apartment" designed by architect Sou Fujimoto is a cute residential complex in Tokyo. Unlike most apartments, a long rectangle is used to separate multiple living spaces. Tokyo Apartment is like a number of large and small single-family houses cleverly stacked together. Each room feels like it is home to a unique resident.

The bento box designed after Tokyo Apartment also uses the same proportions of the original building to create containers that can hold different dishes one by one. In the demonstration example, in order to show the characteristics of multi-national fusion, each bento box space is filled with special dishes from different countries. Japanese, American, and Chinese are like neighbors living near your home from different countries. It is also the epitome of the global village of modern society.

After dismantling this building into a lunch box, you will be even more surprised by its utilization of space, and fully understand how to create as much space as possible on limited land in a narrow and densely populated city like Tokyo. Maximizing living space is also the biggest challenge for architects in this city.

Which building would you like to use as your lunch box?

Although this is just a project made by several architects for fun, it also allows people to see some variability and commonality in design. Observing these buildings through different perspectives can also give people a new experience and experience. learn. Although I don’t know if there will be more architectural lunch box projects in the future, and I don’t know if they will be commercialized, but there is always a need for some interesting ideas and things in life to provide some fun to the seemingly static daily life. Do you have a building in mind that you would like to use to make a lunch box?