Building Frame of the House

TR

The house, designed by IGArchitects, is located in Tokyo, Japan. The office describes the project as follows:

This small architecture is one big room.

There is not much separation wall inside, and the space is created by the floor, building frame walls and steps.

The house is for a married couple. They have vague boundary between their private and work life, therefore they were imagining a house where they can work anywhere and where they can sense the presence of each other wherever in the house. With such lifestyle, rather than to have a small spaces for a compact living, instead the house was designed to have large air volume and scale that makes various interactions of inside and outside space. This led to the idea of the house of frame which is strong but flexible, where it allows a liberal way of living.

The north side wall in the building has skewed to create a space that connects to the adjacent vacant site. Along that wall, the heights and depth of each floor had adjusted throughout the building. These misaligned 3 walls and 7 floor slabs with different heights and depths overlap to each other without breaking up its top and bottom end. This structure creates openings that bring in natural light and breeze, but by avoiding views into other houses. There is no opening to the south side, thus strong sunlight does not penetrate inside. However natural light reaches in all day from over the north side wall, allowing rich senses of time, weather, and season changes. As it goes further back in the house, where its more distanced from the openings, service functions such as kitchen and bathroom are located. In contrast, as it approaches to the front road, the openings get wider and bigger, getting closer to outside. In middle for a big city, the site itself is not big enough to create garden or balcony with adequate space. Instead, this house is designed to have large openings that makes the inside space like garden or balcony when its fully opened.

The floors do not fully function with one piece alone, as for how small each of they are, but it shows its complete potential when its used along with other displaced floors. It turns into a seat, table, shelve, ceiling. There is almost no place that has dedicated use, and the entire space in the house are made with relationship of misaligned floors. By first entering from the front door and as it proceeds up, it gives a sense of gradational shifts of the space. By placing human scaled stairs and furniture inside of a strong and large ancient building like structure of reinforced concrete, the building suits for human use, and moreover it aims to create affluent experience that exceeds that of its functional suit alone.

This simple structure of offsetting wall and laying floors in different heights allows them to interact to each other, which made it possible to create openness that seems much more than the actual total floor area of 60m2. This is a one big room built as a result of a reality of living in a city center and a possibility of a small site. The things at far away and close things coexist, and sometimes its separate and sometimes its repetitive. This relationship is formed into a structure, and into a home.

Building with concrete
The reason for the attraction to reinforced concrete is its strength. Architecture is said that its condition is the best when it only has the structure. This is probably because the space purely shows its strength when there’s no obstructions of finishes and furniture. When other materials are used for structure, it seems flimsy since it must be completed with finishing materials. However concrete structure can be exposed without additional finishing materials, which shows pure texture and dignity in a space. In order to let this strength to flow in the space, the concrete surface was kept as much as possible, and necessary finishes and functionalities were placed like furniture. In this way, the house can be interpreted as a shop too, and this is how I always plan buildings. A friend who saw the model of “Café in Ujina” thought it was a house, also people thought “One Legged House” was a parking space during its construction. The intention is to build structure that functions in a diverse way, which is the original form of architecture, by using features that only concrete can have.

Concrete cannot be redone, therefore its impossible to completely control it no matter how many drawings has drawn and how carefully its constructed. That’s why the patterns and hand marks of construction becomes the charms of the building, and discoveries can happen too. The stairs of this house got uneven surface because of the rain, and when it has been smoothened, aggregates emerged. The surface has been kept like that since then. The fun sometimes appears when its uncontrollable.