🇯🇵Japan·Private home, not open to visitors

Rokko Housing I (六甲の集合住宅I)

Nada-ku, Kobe (Hyōgo)

Sources checked October 2026

“Concrete homes stepped up a 60-degree slope at the foot of Mount Rokko.”

Year: 1983
Architect: Tadao Ando
Type: Housing complex
Access: Occupied homes, no visits

Tadao Ando built these reinforced-concrete apartments in 1983 at the foot of Mount Rokko in Kobe, on the 60-degree slope rising behind a flat plot that the client had first meant to build on. Modules of 5.8 m by 4.8 m step along the terrain, leaving offsets and voids between them that give each home a different plan. It is the first phase of a complex that three more phases later extended.

A private, lived-in home: it is not open to visitors. It is placed without an address, from a public source, at neighbourhood or city level.

In depth ≈ 1 min read

History

In the late 1970s Tadao Ando was asked to design collective housing at the foot of Mount Rokko. The client had in mind the flat, levelled part at the front of the site; after discussion, Ando designed the complex on the 60-degree slope behind it, with Le Corbusier's sketches of hillside housing in mind. An active seismic fault runs along the bottom of the slope. The design also put a pool on the finest spot of the site, as somewhere people would gather. The project is dated 1978-81 and the construction 1981-83.

The building site was perilous: the risk of a landslide was known, and a small Kobe building firm took it on. Ando and the project manager were both in their thirties. Finished in 1983, the complex was followed by three more phases for different clients; Ando had proposed turning the whole area into slope housing.

Architecture

The principle is simple: set housing blocks on the natural terrain. The offsets and gaps that result are used as "swellings" of space: the whole keeps its unity as one building, yet every home has a different plan. The modules measure 5.8 m by 4.8 m and twenty homes step up the slope. The floor area is 1,779 m2.

The structure and the facades are reinforced concrete, and the stepped composition follows the slope. The site faces south, with views over Osaka Bay as far as the port of Kobe.