Hasta La Ideas

Plywood boards in a variety of colours generated the multi-tonal concrete facade of this house in Yokohama by Japanese architects no.555 (+ slideshow).

The house is located at the top of a hill in the Yamate Bluff neighbourhood, a popular tourist area filled with western-style houses from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, architect Takuya Tsuchida of no.555 didn’t want to reflect the appearance of these buildings too closely. ”I believe that building design should both respect and challenge the potential of an area and the direct environment,” he said.

The concrete walls of the house were cast in-situ and took up pigments from the different plywood panels, which were arranged in a stretcher pattern to create the impression of over-sized brickwork.

Large rectangular openings puncture each elevation, revealing plant-filled terraces on each floor of the three-storey house.

On the upper floors these terraces offer views over the city, while on the ground floor one of the openings is used as a driveway.

Residents can enter the house on the first floor as well as the ground floor, as a metal staircase climbs up to one of the terraces.

An open-plan kitchen and living room benefit from the views on the top floor, while bedrooms are at ground level.

Other houses we’ve featured from Japan recently include one with a boat-like living room and one with a skewed upper storey.

See more stories about Japanese houses »

Here’s a project description from the architects:

The project NDA (Planter) is located on top of a steep slope in “Yamate Bluff”, Yokohama, Japan. This area offers panoramic views over the city and the Mount Fuji.

In the vicinity there is a small but beautiful park that has many preserved houses and is popular among tourists.

The “Yamate Bluff Load” is an area featuring many retaining walls. The texture and the facades’ overall appearance is inspired by this particularity.

Reducing the standard size of the concrete panels affected the amount of mortar joints, thus creating a somehow more busy pattern.

Another intention was to accentuate the “handmade feel” with a rich variety of concrete hues and a random layout of the concrete panels.

Several plywood colors were used for the moulds in order to “transfer” the diversity of the hues onto the concrete panels. This technique could be considered as a natural counterpart of the application of lye.

In addition the project’s goal was to combine the conflicting client’s requests: offering large openings to enjoy the magnificent views, while having some privacy from neighbours.

The building is a wrapped cube where the only necessary voids are cut off to allow light and air to flow inside.

A sense of openness is given thanks to the big outdoor terraces. The building itself is almost like a planter.

The layout of the openings follows a vertical and horizontal imaginary grid.

The cutouts of the facade welcome “plants gardens” on each floor.

Time alters things, seasons weather stones. Architecture is a part of that natural process.

Nevertheless I am convinced that architecture can survive for a long time and co-exist with the surrounding environment.

NDA _ “Planter”
Location: Yokohama , Japan
Architect: no.555 _ Takuya Tsuchida
Structural design: frame works _ Megumi Akimoto
Purpose: single family house

Design period：2010.08 – 2011.03
Construction period: 2011.05 – 2012.05
Site area: 494.14 sq m
Floor Area: 188.00 sq m

Above: timber formwork during construction

The post NDA Planter
by no.555 appeared first on Dezeen.

Japanese studio UID Architects often place gardens inside buildings and this house in Fukuyama is no exception (+ slideshow).

The two-storey family house is nestled amongst an assortment of high-rise buildings, which “shut out the sunlight” according to architect Keisuke Maeda.

Instead of adding windows to the facade, Maeda specified a series of skylights and clerestory windows to bring daylight in from above to the living room, kitchen and children’s room on the top floor.

The indoor garden occupies a double-height space at the centre of the residence and also acts as a lightwell for the entrance lobby at the front of the ground floor.

A grid of bookshelves provides a balustrade around the edge of the courtyard, which is also the location of a wooden staircase connecting the two floors.

Maeda explains how a traditional Japanese townhouse occupied the site previously and also had a garden at its centre, which he believes creates a connection between “past and present”.

This is the third project we’ve recently featured by UID Architects, following a house with sunken rooms and a renovated townhouse.

Other projects by the studio include a timber house at the foot of a mountain and a residence comprising four cedar-clad blocks.

See more Japanese houses on Dezeen »

Photography is by Hiroshi Ueda.

Here’s some information from UID Architects:

Renewal of a form / lasting sense of scale

This is a reconstruction of a house in the centre of the city. The site has 5 meters for lateral directions, and 18 meters for longitudinal one.

This is a north‐south site formed like machiya. The family is consisted of two children and their parents.

The feature of this site is surrounded by buildings on east and west side, and faced on the south road; there is a 30-meter-high car park building. This shuts out the sunlight.

Since the site has many conditions, we thought that it would be comfortable space that we can feel basic elements such as sunlight and wind, and that we succeed to a form which nagaya have had.

As regards to the plan, we put every rooms along with the inner garden that contains the element coathouse has.

Thanks to the shape of the section like 凸, every room that run from north to south can get homogeneous sunlight and wind.

The element of the exterior of a building from inner garden make a room give space like exterior, and depth, so we can feel a vague condition.

Cut-through axonometric – click above for larger image.

The house takes in building-wind possibly from first floor, and go by through the inner garden.

Ground floor plan – click above for larger image.

Which the leaves are trembling in the breeze, visualize wind, sound and sunlight. That helps making a space as if we were in the forest despite in the city.

First floor plan – click above for larger image.

Thanks to the hanging wall run from west to east and ceiling height, every rooms is connected as one room providing each territory, and frame construction, the house takes in many elements of exterior from free section.

Section – click above for larger image.

As we renewed the garden of nagaya that built before, as we make people be aware of the sense of scale that nagaya has. We thought that will be only point that can connect past to present.

Section – click above for larger image.

Location: Fukuyama, Hiroshima, Japan
Name project: Town-House
Architects: UID – Keisuke Maeda
Structural consultants: Konishi Structural Engineers – Yasutaka Konishi, Takeshi Kaneko,
Landscape consultants: Toshiya Ogino Environment Design Office – Toshiya Ogino
General contractor: Yamato Co.Ltd – Monden Umayahara
Structural system: steel construction
Site area: 95.41 sq m
Built area: 75.56 sq m
Total floor area: 138.23 sq m
Date of completion: March 2011

The post Machi House by
UID Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Circular hollows create sunken rooms and curved balconies inside this wooden house in Japan by UID Architects (+ slideshow).

The residence is named Pit House, in reference to the six excavated spaces that provide circular living rooms inside the building and terraces in the garden.

“Since the clients lived in the upper storey of a company residence before, they demanded to connect with the earth,” explained architect Keisuke Maeda. “The concept is inevitably drawn from the request of the clients, and the context of the site. It becomes a subterranean room with little influence of the open air, and a relationship with the external surface of the earth.”

A cedar box encases the house and is propped up on stick-like legs so that it appears to hover above the sunken ground floor.

A large rectangular opening reveals a recessed balcony behind the facade, which branches out from an L-shaped first floor.

Circular holes in this upper floor line up with the shapes of the rooms below, creating a curved balcony around the edge of the two bedrooms.

A concrete cylinder stretches up from the lower floor to the roof, enclosing a circular bathroom and a storage closet, while a staircase spirals around its perimeter.

Other projects we’ve featured by UID Architects include a timber house at the foot of a mountain and a residence comprising four cedar-clad blocks.

See more Japanese houses on Dezeen »

Photography is by Koji Fujii/Nacása & Partners.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

The house positions itself in Okayama Prefecture near Seto Inland Sea. The site is located on a terraced mountain hill that was developed as a residential land. The family is consisted of a married couple and a child. We considered a new way of architecture on the site condition, where views are open towards the north and the ground level is one meter higher than the road level.

The relationship is as if the site’s natural environment and the architecture coexist at the same time. The architecture has become a part of the whole landscape of undivided environment, not simply thinking about connection to the surroundings from the cut off opening in walls.

This time, we came up with a living form that accepts the outside environment such as surface of the terraced land, surrounding neighboring houses’ fences and walls, residences that sit along the slope and far beyond mountains. The architectural principle is not a division from the land with a wall, but an interior that is an extension of the outside and connection of the surface like a pit dwelling that is undivided from the land.

In concrete, six types of floor levels including a round floor that is created by digging the surface are connected with a concrete cylinder core at the center. Furthermore, delicate and multiple branch-like columns that support the slightly floating boxes produce various one-room spaces.

Environment and architecture create new extensive relationship by connecting surfaces. The territory is undefined in the space in a body sense. I think that is more natural relationship of an architecture standing in a landscape

Name project: Pit house
Architects: UID – Keisuke Maeda

Exploded axonometric – click above for larger image

Consultants:
Stuctural engineers: Konishi Structural Engineers – Yasutaka Konishi, Takeshi Kaneko, structural;
Environmental: Toshiya Ogino Environment Design Office – Toshiya Ogino
General contractor: Nakamura Construction Co.Ltd. – Hiromi Nakamura,Yasunobu Hida, Keizou Yoshioka, Kazuhiko Kiminami

Ground floor plan – click above for larger image and key

Materials:
Structural system: steel structure
Exterior: ceder plate, wood protection paint,
Interior: structual plywood, exposed concrete, wood protection paint, cherry flooring

First floor plan – click above for larger image and key

Site area: 232.12 sq m
Built area: 115.32 sq m
Total floor area: 116.66 sq m
Date of completion: October 2011

Section – click above for larger image and key

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UID Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

This house by Japanese architects a.a.+H has two roofs and four more tiny houses inside (+ slideshow).

The house in Saitama, north of Tokyo, has two sets of of roof beams which create an intermediate balcony space between them.

Half of the inner roof is covered with polycarbonate sheets which seal off the space while allowing light through to the ground floor.

The other half is uncovered, allowing a view to the outer roof which is clad in wooden panels.

Four small houses have also been built on each corner of the ground floor, nestling against the beams of the inner roof.

The tiny houses have corrugated slate roofs and chipboard screen doors in the traditional Japanese style, and they contain the bedrooms, bathroom and living room.

This isn’t the first house within a house we’ve featured on Dezeen – similar projects from Japan include an inside-out house that lets in rain and wind and a house hidden behind a facade of unglazed openings.

Other Japanese houses we’ve featured recently include a shimmering steel tower in Kyoto and a wedge-shaped house coated in gravel.

See all our stories about Japanese houses »

Photographs are by Hiroshi Ueda.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

Under a tree, under the tarps, Under the hut…
The concept was to configure the internal structure of the house to create the illusion that the inside of the home acts as the outside of ‘a house within a house’. By incorporating a layout that promotes ample natural lighting, outdoor living is brought into the residence.

Location: Saitama, Japan
Site area: 142.94m2

Building area: 71.55m2
Total floor area: 86.41m2
Type of Construction: wooden

Exterior Materials:
Corrugated metal roofing, corrugated slate, glass fiber reinforced polyester
Interior Materials: OSB, fiber reinforced cement board, corrugated polycarbonate

Above: ground floor plan

Design time: May 2010 – Jun 2011
Date of completion： Dec 2011

Above: first floor plan

Design: Kaoru Kuzukawa + Masatoshi Shikada　(a.a.+H)
Structural engineer: Taro Yokoyama (LOW FAT structure Inc.)

Above: section

The post Outside (Outside) ((Outside))
by a.a.+H appeared first on Dezeen.

This shimmering steel house in Kyoto by Japanese architects ALPHAville towers above its vernacular neighbours.

Triangular cut-aways create light wells on two opposite sides of the building, where all the windows are lined up on top of one another.

Inside the house are three split-level storeys, connected by paper-like stairs with white surfaces and black undersides.

“The sunlight shifts from east to west, the wind blows through from the first floor to the third floor and all the noise from outside, all the discontinuous context is transformed by simple architecture,” explain architects Kentaro Takeguchi and Asako Yamamoto.

See more projects by Alphaville here, including a house with slanted walls and square peepholes.

See more Japanese houses on Dezeen »

Photography is by Kei Sugino.

Here’s a few project details from the architects:

W-Window House

Use: residence
Site: Kyoto, Japan

Site area: 47.6m2
Building area: 28.13m2
Total floor area: 72.42m2

Building scale: 3 stories
Structure system: steel
Structural engineer: Kazuo Takeguchi (AOI Structural Engineering Office Co.Ltd)

Isometric diagram

Structural diagram

Plans (1. Dining Room, 2. Storage, 3. Bathroom, 4. Living room, 5. Bedroom)

Section (1. Dining Room, 2. Storage, 3. Bathroom, 4. Living room, 5. Bedroom)

Elevation

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by ALPHAville appeared first on Dezeen.