Architecture Competition Spirala Community Home Clients Favorite and BB Green Award prize winners – Ryo Murata, Mizuho Ueyama, Tomohiro Koizumi and Renata Baksai

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the Clients Favorite and Green prize winners of our “Spirala Community Home” competition – Ryo Murata, Mizuho Ueyama, Tomohiro Koizumi and Renata Baksai from Japan!

Clients Favorite and Green Award winners from Japan

Ryo Murata Laboratory is an architectural design and research laboratory founded in 2014 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Our laboratory is exploring the theme of “creating architecture and cities in response to the environment” throughout practices of design and research in various contexts. We are a diverse group of people, now 20 members with backgrounds spanning from all over the world. The members from Hungary, Russia, and Japan collaborated together for this project.

Brief information about the projects that you/your company have been involved with. For instance, what scale have you focused on/preferred, any significant projects where the company/ individuals have been involved?

We have worked on a wide range of architectural scales, from a small house with a courtyard in a high-density area of Tokyo to a large research facility on university campus, and from spatial detail design to low carbon investigation, with high consciousness of the passive solar design philosophy. Focusing on the inherent principle of hidden shapes and forms in architecture and exploring ways in which architecture and cities are appropriate for the environment of modern society is the theme that we are following in our laboratory.

What does architecture mean to you and what is the role of an architect in your society?

As the importance of "building for a sustainable society" has increased, it is required that architectural designs make use of their potential by reading the characteristics of their local natural environments and history. Therefore, as architects, we have to capture architecture and the environment in multilateral methods, creating a balance between design and engineering.

Why do you participate in architecture competitions?

Considering various historical and geographical factors and their relationships with architecture and cities; we are practicing design and research with the objective of clarifying the fundamental mechanisms of an excellent building environment.

What advice would you give to individuals who struggle to decide whether it would be beneficial for them to participate in architecture competitions?


By working on the design of buildings in new areas and on new scales that we have never tried before, we gain new perspectives. It is easier to do something than worry about it.