ZXY三鷹

The Fried Egg Theory – Creating a variety of space

The relationship between the suburbs and the city needs reorganization. If we only look at the daily commute situation of office workers between locations, we can conclude that the Japanese city is not yet mature. Problems of such scale certainly are within the domain of city planning; however, the everyday reality is pressuring us to find faster, incremental ways to improvement.

This project is the flagship store for a network of satellite workspace across the country, which would allow professionals on the move to find convenient work locations, shortening their daily commute back and forth between the office, home or meetings. We had to create a design system. The challenge was to create and maintain recognizable brand identity for our client, while responding to the individual character of each location. We base our system on what we called the “Fried Egg” theory. When one fries an egg, the yoke stays a beautiful circle, while depending on the way we break the egg, or the shape and size of the frying pan the white changes shape. Through the combination of an unchanging yoke and always different white, the fried egg provides balance between consistency and individuality. Hiroshi Shimizu discusses this theory regarding human relationships in his book “The thought of Place”. When we apply this thought process to architectural space, it allows us to create space which are at once similar, and tailored to each location.