The fence is the building, for now

A construction fence stands at the south side of an intersection in Kitazawa 2-chome, three meters tall, thirty meters long, light-grey modular steel panels with vertical ribs. Behind it a residential project is being built. The concrete basement has already been poured, the rebar is up, a yellow crane crosses the sky. Nothing else of the house exists yet.

What does exist is the fence. New sheet metal, clean ribs, fresh hex-head bolts. Mounted on the panels at eye level, three laminated Construction Notices in Japanese, sun-bleached to the color of old paper, edges curled, taped corners visible.

The fence is the building for now. The poured basement does not yet have a face. The crane is provisional. The notices are the only writing on the project. The thing standing in front of the lot is the only form the house currently has.

Read head-on, the long elevation is its own architecture. Vertical ribs at regular intervals, a flat surface between them, two yellowed papers mounted off-center. The rib spacing reads as a facade rhythm. The corrugation profile is a Japanese kari-kakoi standard, the same typology that wraps every Tokyo lot in the year before its building arrives.

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The lot in Kitazawa exists, the fence exists, the basement is poured. The notices read 工事のお知らせ. What does not exist is the house behind the fence, and so this work treats the fence itself as the current building. When the actual house is finished, the fence will come down and this image will be the only version where the fence was a building.