Galleria is a four-storey art gallery that is sandwiched between a busy road and low-rise office buildings in a hypothetical urban site in Japan. The only visual reliefs are the small pocket of park just adjacent to it, as well as another small open space just opposite the main vehicular thoroughfare. Considering that the project is a public gallery, the eventual design was envisioned to be as porous (visually and/or physically) to the public as possible, a quality that is typically lacking in many other existing urban buildings in the hypothetical site.

The design intent of the project is thus two-folds. Firstly, public engagement around, into and within the gallery is strengthened via a greater sense of connection between the upper and lower floors by means of volumetric spatial qualities derived from an atrium and a series of mezzanine floors. Secondly, the tectonics of the gallery, expressed as cantilevering concrete volumes of contrasting visual-spatial porosities, are expounded upon to push the limits of the gallery's overall reinforced concrete wall structure.