Floating on a fantastical plane A Japanese Manga Artist's House

It is perhaps not an exaggeration, then, to say that architecture in manga and anime is a way of 'world-building,' where the duplicity of the real and fictional environment finds a middle ground. Drawing on this concept, Japanese architect Tan Yamanouchi along with AWGL, Tokyo, envisioned 'A Japanese Manga Artist’s House' in Tokyo, Japan, as “a building that floats a few centimetres above our daily lives…to ensure that the dwelling is still tied to our tangible daily life but evokes a sense of fictional narrative.”

Offering a spatiotemporal setting, one that drives the narrative and at times also functions as a social commentary, tying themes of ecology, trauma, modernism, nature and futurism, the architecture of manga and anime operates at a fantastical plane, while staying rooted in contemporary times. As such, the application of architecture in the ultra-creative universe of anime and manga plays into the trope of aesthetics, enabling the diversity and totality of the aesthetic experience one finds in nature. Furthering traditional Japanese concepts of wabi-sabi (the concept of transience and evolution of natural things and the beauty expressed through it) and iki (the concept of aestheticism relevant among the merchant class of Edo, referring to a refinement in dressing and mannerisms).