Roof and Rectangular House / Jun Igarashi Architects

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Text description provided by the architects. I keep on design activities in Hokkaido, so most of my projects ran there. By designing in a remarkably cold, I continued thinking on response to completely different contexts from other areas. They are mainly “cold” and “snow”. Of course there are other various things to deal with, but these contexts have the great impact. In this state, I felt the possibility of “a windbreak room” and thought about the expansion and diversity.

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This was not only a physical response, but also a response to pleasure. Even in the building code, there are rules that respond to the area of the frost line. However, the code primarily corresponds to performance, not to pleasure. Some people think it is natural, but I think that it is natural to think that its criterions are for the purpose of people's pleasure. In that case, I have long believed that there should be regional standards and easing of regulations about the size of the "roof" in the snowy land. Snowfall gives various restrictions to our life. The most serious of them is cleaning snow. Houses are often built mainly in residential areas. That means that the building coverage ratio is low. Therefore, the size of the roof becomes smaller.

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What I always think about when I designed for example the roof of the approach between the “windbreaker room” and the main infrastructure road and the parking space is that the life in snowy land is dramatically improved by rather doing away with than easing of the building coverage ratio. Furthermore, there is a possibility that it can lead to the creation of landscape peculiar to the area. From this kind of thinking I designed this house. First of all, we set up a large roof full of building coverage ratio and placed a compact one-room dwelling below it. The air volume was reduced by using the frost line.

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Between the interior space and the outdoor space there is a rectangle under the large roof. Although this space is treated as an indoor in the building code, physically it can be said that both outdoor and indoor, semi-indoor and semi-outdoor. The rectangle under the roof responds to the pleasure of life both summer and winter. And it will connect life with the city and the earth space. It is also an attempt and possibility of an intermediate area.

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