MOBY DICK （M-RESIDENCE）

In Hayama, on a steep slope overlooking Sagami Bay, the site drops some twelve meters from top to bottom. The first time we stood on it, an image came to us: a huge white creature twisting its body as it prepares to dive into the sea, and inside it, a body open wide to the sea alone. It was the moment when the words the client had given us beforehand resonated with the landscape of the site and came together into a single image.

Those words included phrases like these: "spaces and forms connected to the view"; "an atmosphere woven from the many expressions and presences of the land"; "first, a single board is laid down like a stage, and I stand on it with nothing but myself"; "the house and the person do not exist separately; I dissolve into the place"; "as if on a journey." And further: "no corridors or halls that exist only for passing through"; "every place should be one where you want to linger"; "like a Matisse drawing, warm and sensual, made of only the barest lines." We read deeply into the images these words held, in our own way, and translated each of them into space. In a sense, this is architecture born of words and images.

Toward the road, that is, toward society, the house presents a closed and silent face. All that rises from the ground is a streamlined white back, stretching down the slope toward the sea. A large curved wall of weathering steel wraps around it, following the bend of the road, so that landform and architecture melt into one continuous whole. Descending the approach between two parallel walls, you draw closer to the house little by little. It is a sequence that gives direct form to a line from the client's brief: "the story of this house begins on the far side of the road, before the house is even in sight." Toward the sea, nature's own exterior, the house opens itself completely. Several white boxes thrust out from the cliff into the air, leaning out over the water as if to face the sea alone.

Inside, in contrast to the crisp boxes outside, curving white walls undulate in one continuous flow. Guided across white floors by a light well planted with trees and by arcing stairs, you move from scene to scene, as though traveling through the body of a living creature. There are no corridors merely for passing through. A living room and lounge open to the sea, a rooftop terrace gathered around a fire, a bathroom facing straight into the sunset: every place is made to invite you to pause and stay a while.

Structurally, the house is composed of several large tube-like boxes, giving it ample strength and seismic resistance. We also studied in detail, early on, the complex regulations particular to a site with such a steep drop, so that the plan would not have to change significantly once it moved into detailed design.

The name *MOBY DICK* comes from the house’s form, like a huge white creature gently bending toward the sea. But it also comes from the figure of its inhabitant: someone who turns away from the everyday world to live facing only the sea, and who seemed to us somehow to overlap with Captain Ahab, possessed by the white whale, the sea incarnate, and driven to the edge of madness.

What determines the quality of architecture, above all of a house, is the worldview of the person who lives in it. No project has made us feel this more strongly. Words of a depth we had never encountered in any other project defined the image of this house. Of all our unbuilt works, it is the one closest to our hearts, and someday, somewhere, we hope to give form to what we thought through here.