Zoning Mountain is a project in Toyama City that places 3 small houses on a single site, facing the Tateyama mountain range. Toyama sits in a broad plain enclosed on 3 sides by the Northern Alps, the Tateyama mountains, and other peaks above 3,000 meters, giving the city an unusually direct relationship with mountainous landscape from almost any window. Studio Velocity used that relationship as the organizing principle for the project.

Each of the 3 houses is composed of 3 volumes, producing 6 building volumes in total. These are distributed across 3 different ground levels, stepping with the mountain contour rather than sitting on a single flat plane. The decision to follow the contour has a practical consequence: the rooms used by office staff, the workspace, and the salon where the general public gather are all placed on the same level, allowing horizontal movement between them without changes in floor height. The mountain topography provides the sectional organization; the social program is resolved within it.

The slightly curved plan geometry of each building is deliberate. A straight arrangement of volumes would read as artificially imposed on the site; the curved plan softens that reading, making the relationship between the buildings and the mountain backdrop feel less contrived. The central earthwork or mound between the structures functions simultaneously as a soft division of the site into 3 zones, as an observation platform with views of the Tateyama range, and as a formal element that gives the project its name.