Hasta La Ideas

This house in Tokyo by Japanese studio Case-Real is rectangular at the front and hexagonal at the back (+ slideshow).

Japanese architect Koichi Futatsumata of Case-Real designed the two-storey House in Tsurumaki for a north-facing site in Setagaya, but was asked by the clients to create a south-facing living room.

To accommodate this, he added a hexagonal plan to the rear of the house. This created space for additional windows, which are set at 30-degree angles rather than facing directly towards neighbouring houses.

“This shape resulted in a plan where sunlight continuously shines into the living room from dawn till dusk,” said the design team.

The living room is located on the upper floor, with a guest bedroom positioned underneath. A wooden staircase runs along the edge of the two rooms, following the outline of the hexagon.

“The existence of this hexagonal structure works as a strong element to categorise the function, structure and design of the entire house,” added the designers.

A six-sided ceiling angles up into a central point and is framed by wooden beams that have been painted grey-blue.

This colour recurs throughout the house, from walls and doors to kitchen cabinets, staircase treads and balustrades. It is also used for the exterior walls and roof.

Bedrooms for the parents and children are situated on separate storeys at the front of the house. The kitchen can be found on the first floor and features a ladder leading to a small mezzanine loft.

Photography is by Takumi Ota.

Here’s a project description from Case-Real:

House in Tsurumaki (Tokyo, Japan, 2013)

A detached house standing in the high density residential area in Tokyo.

The site for this project was one of the five subdivided areas with the north side facing the street, and the other three sides neighbouring the other houses. Within these difficult circumstances the client wished for a living room on the south side full of sun light.

The core of this residential housing is the hexagon volume on the southern side of the site. This shape resulted in a plan where sunlight continuously shines into the living room from dawn till dusk.

Creating a minimum parking space needed for a compact car and by sliding the volume of the structure to the north as far as possible, we were able to keep a planting ground and to efficiently let light into the room.

For the plan of each floor and its traffic lines, the roof and the beam which can be seen at the ceiling of the 2nd floor, the existence of this hexagonal structure works as a strong element to categorise the function, structure and design of the entire house.

Design: Koichi Futatusmata, Yasushi Arikawa (CASE-REAL)
Structural Engineer: Hirofumi Ohno (Ohno Japan)
Design Cooperation, Construction: Yoshida building firm
Lighting Plan: Tatsuki Nakamura (BRANCH lighting design)Location: Tokyo, Japan

Type of Project: Newly build
Use: Residence
Period: Jun 2012 – Jun 2013

Structure: Wood frame
Scale: 2 storey
Building area: 61.2 sqm
Site area: 123 sqm

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living room by Case-Real appeared first on Dezeen.

Some of the concrete walls of this house in Yokohama, Japan, by Tai and Associates were formed against wooden planks, while some have been rendered white and others have been left plain (+ slideshow).

Japanese studio Tai and Associates designed the two-storey House in Shinoharadai for a hillside corner plot already owned by the family, creating separate floors for different generations and a small home office.

“A new program composed of a two-family residence and office is applied to the building, while paying attention to preserve the family’s history and memories attached to the land,” said the architects. Continue Reading…

Japanese studio Tato Architects references the ad-hoc extensions of neighbouring buildings with the steel, concrete and wooden volumes that make up this house in Osaka, Japan (+ slideshow).

Located on the hillside of Mount Ikoma, House in Ishikiri is a three-storey family home and was designed by Tato Architects as a composition of three separate blocks.

From the rear, the house comprises a glazed ground-floor storey with a gabled upper floor floating above, while the street facade reveals an extra storey and garage tucked underneath.

“We observed favourably the mosaic pattern of old and rebuilt houses telling each history of over 80 years,” said architect Yo Shimada, explaining how he approached the design as a collection of connected elements.

“We proceeded with the design by making the places step by step, searching for an appropriate way of building the house that adapts to surrounding environments,”  he added.

A steel-plated box forms part of the lower ground floor, and contains a storage space and small toilet. A steel framework extends across it, creating space for the adjacent garage.

A split-level living and dining room occupies a double-height space on the middle floor and features sliding doors that open the space out to a wooden roof terrace.

A children’s bedroom is also situated on this floor. Positioned on top of the steel box, it comes with a row of windows around its base.

A staircase cantilevered from the dining room’s concrete wall leads up to a master bedroom and balcony on the top floor.

The kitchen is positioned at the opposite end of the house, overlooking a rear garden. A guest room above can be accessed by climbing a wooden ladder that extends up through a hole in the ceiling.

Tato Architects has completed a number of houses in Japan with complicated interiors, including one where wooden furniture forms sections of staircases and one with its upper floors contained inside sheds that sit on the roof.

Photography is by Shinkenchiku-sha.

Here’s a description from the architects:

House in Ishikiri

In between ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Dark concrete walls and a black house form volume above it, a translucent lean-to roof, a white high flat roof and a silver box under it. Those totally different and inconsistent materials and colours are combined to form this house.

The site is in a residential area developed around 1930, sloping to the west on a hillside of Mt. Ikoma, which overlooks the urban area of Osaka Plain. We observed favourably the mosaic pattern of old and rebuilt houses telling each history of over eighty years.

It was not easy to find out the way for making the house coordinated to the surroundings as the site is 3.5m up from the road so that the house would look larger than the actual size. We proceeded with the design by making places step by step searching an appropriate way of building the house that adapt to surrounding environments.

First, we made concrete walls with rough texture by using formwork made by small split lauan to match with old masonry walls and concrete-block walls in surrounding environments, and covered those with a black house form structure following the roof form of houses in the neighbourhood. After that, living space is made in the way as renovating interior space. The space for facilities to support the daily life such as a kitchen and a bathroom is made in between the concrete walls and the cliff-retaining wall behind the house, covered with a translucent lean-to roof and wooden windows and doors.

On the road side, a thin, modern flat-roof, which represents a new life style and cars covers the box made of steel plates commonly used for temporary enclosure at construction sites in Japan, pretending the atmosphere of ongoing construction sites.

These resulted in making places that are related to both ‘before’ and ‘after’. Living places are provided in space where different time-axes meet as ‘concrete walls’ and ‘a black house-type,’ ‘concrete walls’ and ‘a retaining wall,’ and ‘a white flat-roof’ and ‘boxes of steel plates.’

Rethinking the whole residential are from the way that this house exists would suggests us to rediscover potentials and richness of all elements and space among those with different histories in the area.

Project name: House in Ishikiri
Location of site: Osaka, Japan
Site area: 233.32m2
Building area: 61.37m2
Total floor area: 99.38m2
Type of Construction: Steel
Program: house
Project by: Tato Architects
Principal designer:Yo Shimada
Design period: March 2010 – April 2012
Construction period: July 2012 – January 2013

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Tato Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Partitions that don’t reach the ceiling create the illusion of a larger space in this renovated flat in Japan by Naruse Inokuma Architects (+ slideshow).

Naruse Inokuma Architects completed the single-storey renovation in an older building and retained the existing ceiling beams, painting sections of the ceilings in five subtly different pale colours.

The arrangement of colours doesn’t match up with the positions of the wooden divisions, so the individual rooms feel more spacious because the edge of the ceiling extends beyond the wall and can’t be seen.

“We kept all the partitions at a height below the beams to create connected spaces while maintaining a sense of privacy,” said the architects.

“The colours emphasise an expanse of space beyond the separate rooms and alter their expression dramatically with the smallest change in lighting,” they added.

The compact flat includes two bedrooms separated by an atelier, plus a large combined living and dining room. The kitchen and bathroom are separated by the main entrance hall.

Wooden furniture and floorboards also feature throughout the flat.

Other projects by Naruse Inokuma on Dezeen include a shared occupancy house with communal areas for cooking, eating and relaxing and a renovated apartment with unfinished plywood and cement smeared over concrete.

See more projects by Naruse Inokuma »
See more Japanese houses »

Photography is by Masao Nishikawa.

Here’s a short description from the architects:

Skyroom

This is a renovation project for an old, 80m2 flat. Here, creating an expanse of space within a small, limited area was our biggest theme.

We kept all the partitions at a height below the beams to create connected spaces while maintaining a sense of privacy. The ceiling, crisscrossed with beams, was painted in five kinds of pale colours.

Slightly shifted from the layout of the rooms, these colours emphasise an expanse of space beyond the separate rooms and alter their expression dramatically with the smallest change in lighting. Although they compose the small interiors of an 80m2 space, these rooms feel as though they embrace the wide-open sky that changes in expression every moment of every day.

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Inokuma Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Three separate sections built in different cities make up this steel-framed house in Nara, Japan, by Tokyo architects Megumi Matsubara and Hiroi Ariyama (+ slideshow).

Megumi Matsubara worked alongside Hiroi Ariyama of Assistant Studio to design House of 33 Years, which is made from a mixture of exposed raw materials including steel, timber, concrete, steel cables, clear corrugated plastic and glass panels.

Located next door to an ancient Buddhist temple, the house was designed for an elderly couple who decided to move house after 33 years living in their original home together.

Each part of the house was simultaneously built in three separate locations – the cities of Nara, Sendai, and Aomori – before being transported to the site and put together as one unit, which the architects felt would create an architecture that “moves”.

The roof shell was built in Nara, while the main rooms were built in Aomori from local timber. Meanwhile, a section of the first-floor was built at the Sendai School of Design and housed a farm in the school’s courtyard, before being transferred to Nara.

Architect Megumi Matsubara said the house’s location has a special meaning for the couple. “The husband is originally from Nara and had an attachment and melancholic nostalgia with the temple, having spent a considerable amount of his childhood there,” Matsubara said.

A layered arrangement of glass panes and wooden structures through the interior create different visual perspectives depending on where you stand inside the building.

“By framing views across different areas, images are continuously produced by the inhabitants’ movement,” Matsubara said. “Every image is given its own space of possibility, then overlaps as multiple additions to the home to update the family’s memories.”

Accessed by steel staircases and a wooden ladder elevated at different heights, the first-floor bathroom is cantilevered and offers residents a view of the temple’s bamboo forest while bathing.

This floor is the brightest part of the house, while the smaller, darker room on the ground-floor level is used as a bedroom. The combined living, dining and kitchen space is positioned at the back.

Another project we’ve featured by Megumi Matsubara is an installation in Tokyo featuring 10 conceptual machines all beginning with the letter ‘B’.

Other recently completed houses in Japan include a narrow timber house in Tokyo and a residence with angular cutaways create through the walls, floors and ceilings. See more houses in Japan »

Photography is Tadasu Yamamoto, Shinkenchiku-sha.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

House of 33 Years

Megumi Matsubara & Hiroi Ariyama of the architecture firm Assistant are pleased to announce the completion of House of 33 Years after five years since the project’s inception. The House of 33 Years is a residence located next to the world heritage Todaiji Temple in Nara, Japan. The house was designed for an elderly couple who decided to move to a new house thirty three years after living in their first house.

The House of 33 Years is a house for a collector who collects memories, whose memory and future exist simultaneously in the same space. By framing views across different areas, images are continuously produced by the inhabitants’ movement. Every image is given its own space of possibility, then overlaps as multiple additions to the home to update the family’s memories.

In 2012, during the construction process, the fabrication of the house was partly supported by Aomori Contemporary Art Centre and Sendai School of Design. Its design/fabrication process has been an academic research subject of Adaptable Futures, Loughborough University, UK. The house has been awarded SD Review prize in 2010.

The house consists of multiple pavilions and rooms in wood structure that stand under the big steel-frame house. The relationship between the individual elements defines the character of the house as a whole. Its construction process has been pursued in three separate locations simultaneously; Nara, Sendai, and Aomori. In Nara, the exterior steel roof to cover the whole residence has been constructed on-site.

Then, having accepted offers by two public institutions, Sendai School of Design and Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, to participate in their artist-in-residence programs, the duo decided to build an unknown experience by linking the two institutions through a single residential housing project, to eventually constitute the house in Nara.

They broke House of 33 Years, which had been designed as a single house, into parts suitable for making in the two programs, so that the architecture would “move,” so to speak. Each work was also realised as an individual installation piece on which additional features were elaborated, responding to demands from the institution, characteristics of the space, and the chosen method of exhibiting.

In Sendai, Ghost House, a pavilion to sit on the roof, was built with the students of Sendai School of Design. The pavilion is an homage to Ghost House, one of the pavilions scattered on the large premises of the famous house of Philip Johnson and was given the same name. Over the summer it was sitting in the courtyard of a university campus and the students had grown a farm inside.

In Aomori, the main rooms in wood-structure was built and developed together with local carpenters, using materials available in Aomori, as an installation piece Obscure Architecture (House of 33 Years, Study), then to become a part of ‘Kime to Kehai’ exhibition at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre. This work always had a fresh look depending on the movement of the sunlight. Physically, this architectural work remained present in the same position, whereas the natural phenomena created by it kept flowing without stopping. After the exhibition period in each city, those elements were disassembled and loaded on a 4-ton truck, and carried to the destination, Nara, where they were recomposed to form the House of 33 Years.

Project name: House of 33 Years
Location: Nara, Japan
Architects: Megumi Matsubara and Hiroi Ariyama (Assistant Studio)
Client: private
Purpose: private residence
Structural engineer: Mitsuda Structural Consultants
Site area: 189 square metres
Building area: 76 square metres
Total floor area: 104 square metres
Structure: steel frame, wooden
Number of storeys: 2 storeys
Construction period: March 2011 – June 2013

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Matsubara and Assistant Studio appeared first on Dezeen.