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Architects: YYA / Yusuke Yoshino Architects
- Area: 119 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Takumi Ota
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Construction: Takumi Architectural Factory, Jyunichi Muya
Text description provided by the architects. The site of this project is located in the corner of a new town, Seishin-Chuo in Kobe City, where the client spent his childhood and college years. Though a residential area, the surroundings still retain its rural countryside landscape. Although all of the houses are adjacent to each other, as an exception, on the north side of the site we can find a park. The site is also not as dense as in the city, and the environment is relatively spacious, as the units are arranged in units of about 200m2 in area.
The client's current home is a row house in Osaka that belonged to his grandfather, but the house in Seishin-Chuo, where the client spent his childhood, has been vacant and neglected for many years since his father passed away. Though a modern house using the frame wall construction method, the layout comprised of small, cramped rooms, so through a renovation project, it was intended to bring the house back to life once more.
When we first surveyed the site upon receiving the design request, one thing that caught our attention was the unusual light green exterior walls. As we asked the owner, we were impressed to find that there was care from the owner for maintaining old things. The client's wife, being from Okinawa and only occasionally returning to her hometown, made us wonder if we could create something that would remind them of her hometown. As we saw those green walls, we thought of the emerald-green ocean as a characteristic of Okinawa.
With this feeling in mind, in this project, we aimed to create architecture from the client's unique essence, not in the sense of creating architecture from a personal novel idea. From the past to the present and into the future, we wondered if we could consider renovation from a slightly longer time axis, including the client's house, roots, memories, and materials in the sense of reusing them as objects themselves. We thought that passing on something old would align with the essence of the client's house, and we thought that it would be possible to give it a unique character.
The green color of the existing exterior walls was seen as a common denominator by the client and his wife, and Towada stone was adopted as a material to realize this. Towada stone is a material with excellent qualities; for instance, some of its primary characteristics are that it is porous and has heat and moisture retention, far infrared rays, negative ion emission function, deodorizing effect, adsorption of foul odors, soundproofing and anti-reverberation function. Despite its excellent properties, Towada stone is often used in bathrooms, and we wanted to change this.
In creating a space made of Towada stone, we wanted it to look like a quarry, where traces of the hand of the person who dug out the stone remain. For the walls near the line of sight, we used small widths of 40 x 300 and 55 x 240mm Towada stone to look like traces of stone quarrying. On the other hand, the floor is 900 x 300mm, a large size for a generous expression. When viewed from the outside, the sizeable one-room space transmits the feeling of an ample piloti space.
The terrace floor, which seamlessly continues from the interior, is also made of Towada stone, and the ricin finish of the existing exterior wall is also used for the interior ceiling and long wall finish, making the floor, walls, and ceiling continuous from inside to outside. By doing so, the interior and exterior materials of the ceiling, walls, and floor penetrate each other, creating a continuous relationship between the interior and exterior, such that the interior material is straight to the exterior and the exterior material is constant to the interior, thus achieving a visual spaciousness that exceeds the actual physical space.
We sincerely hope that the renovated house will be handed down to the next generation, by children, grandchildren, and other future generations when they build their own houses, not only through the reuse of its materials like the Towada stone that we applied but also with the memories of the current owner's renovation imbued into it.
