Text description provided by the architects. The site faces a busy road. Near this house, there are galleries, studios and the park where music festival is held every year.
Our clients are an artist and his family. We thought, for the place that they make a work and lives under daily life, the state that the programs such as a house, an atelier, and a shop mixed was good. At the same time, we regarded “Comfort to live in the town” as important. We considered that “Comfort” to be that various hierarchies from the town to a person continued smoothly. Specifically, we used some scales (the scale of civil engineering structure, the scale of furniture/personal articles, the scale of behavior) across boundaries.
Firstly, we put a volume nearer south neighboring land side. Then, the left-over space on the road side continued with space done the setback of the western apartment, and came to have an expanse as a parking, an open space and an open garden.
Secondly, we made three different stories of the height. On the first floor, ceiling height is 4450 mm of the almost same size as the width of the front road (the scale of a town was taken in this house). In the second floor, we adopted the distance between the outer wall with the next door to ceiling height (the second floor like the attic inserted between the first far floor and the third near floor). The third floor is in the height beyond the surrounding roof, and is very bright (we experience neighboring roofs like a landscape).
For each floor, we provided spandrel walls of thickness 270mm. This separates the inside and the outside definitely and gives a sense of security inside, and causes an act from the outside and makes an opportunity of the communication with the inside and the outside. Spandrel wall changes its height in each floor accordingly the scale of behavior, a body and a town. The walls of thickness 106mm on spandrel wall are thin (the inside and outside bodily sensation distance shrink). The size of steel pillar (75×75 mm) is near to the dimensions of furniture and fittings (the existing difference between structure and furniture shrink). And the stairs and the handrail resemble the form of furniture and a tool (the meaning of the element becomes multiplex).
This building is made from such scale operations and limited material. We aimed at the comfortable life in a town full of sectional changes. (Yoshinari Kimura + Naoko Matsumoto)
Structure plan
With this building, solid steel frame pillars of 75mm support 3 stories of floor height 4,715mm.
By using spandrel walls of the first floor as concrete encased column bases to control the buckling length, reducing the weight of fixed load to reduce a long term axial tension, using the brace with the flat bar for a wall to secure necessary horizontal load bearing capacity and necessary rigidity, the structure thickness of the pillar, the beam, and the brace of a perimeter side was able to be suppressed to 75 mm or less as a result.
Furthermore, by stopping ground improvement and thickening the raft foundation as traffic vibration measures with the light-weighting, tightening a precision management condition when selecting a steel fabrication factory, managing the position of the pillar and anchor bolt thoroughly and so on, I made efforts in the making of background of structural beauty for this project. (structure engineers / Eisuke Mitsuda )
