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Architects: Alphaville Architects
- Area: 30 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Toshiyuki Yano
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Manufacturers: LIXIL , Panasonic, Sanwa
Text description provided by the architects. The 24mm plywood house has new feature for Japanese Housing as it is designed for a single household with total floor area of 45㎡, which is the smallest for a house but gorgeous compared to a one-room apartment. It stands in a densely populated residential area to go work easily, to live with many creatures. As the owner wanted to enjoy various atmosphere inside the house, we proposed to separate the space into two places with different relationships with the outside world.
In Area 1, which runs through the center of the house in a cross shape, including the entrance hall on the first floor (with a large water tank for fish and a sleeping area for dogs) and the terrace on the second floor, the windows are wide open to draw the outside environment directly into the house. In Area 2, where is the remaining part of Area1 hollowed out from the house-shaped space, as the air is connected across the first and second floors through the atrium at the four corners, the sunlight, the wind and the sound of the city indirectly come in from the small windows opened here and there.
The partition wall that separates these two areas is made of thin and polyhedral 24 mm plywood. The thinness of the wall avoid the two areas to be separated firmly, and the undulating wall surface reflects and diffuses sunlight so that the difference between two area becomes more clear. The living is a series of actions such as eating, sleeping, bathing and getting dressed, which cannot to be split into tiny rooms. Here we designed not small rooms with poor relation with circumstances, but two spaces with different relationships with circumstances, where you can choose the space corresponding to the activity ranging from private and public, even working in the house for all day long.