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Architects: SAI Architectural Design Office
- Area: 93 m²
- Year: 2019
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Photographs:Norihito Yamauchi
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Manufacturers: Louis Poulsen, Vectorworks, Twinmotion
Text description provided by the architects. This is a project took place in a suburban residential district called Sayama New Town, located in southeast Osaka. This district was developed around 40 years ago. Being still popular as a bed town, it currently holds newly built houses as well.
The clients requested a house where their child and dog can run around energetically. I thought, by living with a dog, people can interact with neighbors during the every-day walk, feeling rich external environments such as weather, climate, and seasons. I wanted to actively incorporate such a by-product produced by the life with a dog into the house.
So, I made a space with an earthen floor like a promenade in the center of the house. This promenade acts as an entrance, a corner of a living room, engawa (Japanese-style loggia), hallway, and part of the terrace. It enables the residents to communicate not only indirectly but also directly with others.
The residents can interact with others in the promenade like they chat on outside roadsides. In the future, the outside terrace and the roof terrace on the second floor can be connected with staircases so that an aisle can appear. This aisle will connect the local area, the first floor, and the second floor and allow the residents to move around. I imagined a new color could be added to the residents’ lives by this promenade placed in the middle of the house. Even though the house is surrounded by walls and other residents, this promenade can foster relationships between people and between people and pets.
Also, the south side of the house needed to be widely covered temporarily because of some land conditions. So, we built a temporal wall made of polycarbonate corrugated plates stuck to tube and coupler scaffolding. We regarded the promenade, the terrace, and the living room as one combined space. We surrounded it with the temporal wall and L-shaped external wall so that the border between the inside space and the outside space would be vague and the living space could be extended.
Then, I maximized the amount of sunlight coming inside the house by using FRP folded plates for a roof above the promenade and lowering the roof terrace’s height placed above the kitchen space on the west side. I selected each material equally for both the inside and outside walls. The L-shaped external wall protects the home as an unchanging solid-looking wall. The south-side outside wall uses a temporal and light material. The inside wall of the water section reflects the lights and colors of lives.
Even with its surrounding structure, I aimed to create a house that brings the town’s richness inside the home by incorporating somewhat outside-like materials and settings like the promenade.
