S-RESIDENCE

This is a plan for a large single-story house for a young couple and their two children, on a long, narrow lot about 12 meters wide and more than 30 meters deep in a densely built residential neighborhood.

"We want privacy for the family, but walling in the whole site would feel suffocating." "We want a space where the family always feels connected, yet we also need functional spaces for the different parts of daily life, and places to be alone." The clients knew these wishes pulled against each other, but they trusted that a solution existed and entrusted the design to us. To honor that trust, we began by covering the site with a single large roof, then cutting openings into it here and there, like small courtyard gardens, to divide inside from outside only loosely. First came the roof. We then drew light and wind into it and added recesses and projections to the plan to create enclosure. Gradually, the space beneath the roof, at first one undivided mass, gave rise to rooms and gardens, almost like a cell dividing. From this process emerged a composition in which a main street runs straight through the center of the house as its trunk, with small indoor and outdoor spaces clustering around it like branches and leaves.

The roof was to be built of CLT (cross-laminated timber), which was just then coming into wider use in Japan. In fact, the design was in part inspired by the arrival of this new material. Rather than punching small windows into the walls, we opened them from floor to ceiling wherever possible, and made most of the remaining walls shear walls that could carry loads and transfer seismic forces to their full capacity. Whether a material is old or new, we look for the way to draw out its full potential, and that basic stance shows here as well.

The clients were delighted with the plan. But the cost of CLT did not come down as we had hoped, and reflecting every one of their requirements for space and function made the house larger than anticipated. Regretfully, the project was put on hold at the end of basic design. Even so, the image of the family space they were looking for, which gradually took shape for the couple as we worked through the plan together, has surely found its way, in one form or another, into the home they live in now.