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Architects: 1990uao
- Area: 150 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Namgoong Sun
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Lead Architect: Yoon GeunJu
Text description provided by the architects. It must be a village lane, there appearing less and less cars, with small houses located sparsely. Climbing along the low slope, you can see the nearby creek and forest, and also feel the layered bent ridgelines of a large mountain. At the entry of the hill which becomes a little steeper, stand two large rocks like door jambs. At the end of the in-between road, exists the client’s parents’ house. On a low and spacious site of which the client’s mother can take care, this Pocheon project is located. On the day we were invited as the architect of this project into the client’s parent’s house, we looked down through the windows of its living room toward the project site. We imagined: the mother would stand like us by the windows looking down to a new house, remaining worried about her daughter’s couple though they are as old enough as close to retirement. So for this project, we placed the kitchen and the living room to be seen from the windows of the mother’s house. We hoped that she could ease her worry, by seeing together the scene in which her daughter’s house is lit up and rice is cooked in a pot.
This project was to build a house as necessary with around 150 sq. m. or so on a spacious site sized more than one thousand sq. m. The site is made up of two levels. One was for a farm machinery warehouse, while the other was for a plastic greenhouse. We accepted these two cultivated levels as the given natural topography. We put the new house on the larger ground where the former warehouse was located while connecting it to the lower ground with stairs and a bridge. It is the typical organization of rooms that designs the sequence from the vestibule through the living room to the kitchen, the shared bathroom, and finally to individual bedrooms. It resembles the modern social hierarchy like a large circle including small subsets in a top-down sequence, from “society” through “family” to “individuals.” This is why so many people can sympathize with the television drama scene in which a patriarchal father sits on the sofa occupying the living room and the other family members feel afraid to walk out of their rooms. This is because the living room is designed as the central space of a house.
Unlike this, our Pocheon project adopted the organization of rooms attached to a common corridor. Here, the rooms continue in a horizontal relationship: either the living room or the kitchen is an independent room attached to the corridor, there being no central room that dominates the whole house. The corridor connects the rooms as freely as the users want. The windows and doors being there can extend the landscape and functions. In other words, it aims at an open social structure in which various lifestyles can be organized in a house according to the residents’ choice of rooms. The reason why we made this long house is simple: to efficiently manage the given site in an economic manner, as well as to reflect today’s social structure becoming to the client’s family whose members share an open mind. The long building crossing the site separates the inner yard from the outside. Instead of putting particular fences, we designed low and long windows along the village-lane side of the long mass. The windows are as open enough as not to look closed when viewed from the village lane, while the tender landscape is maintained with the small garden forest and fields on the low ground. The inner yard looks toward the windows of the mother’s house, accepting the nearby hilly terrain. Along this inner yard, the meandering curvy terrain makes various scenes according to the depth, from the entry to the main room, and to the separate structure. Putting low fences properly helps organize the whole.
Standing at the vestibule, you can see the village lane and landscape over the large window. The long house which seemed to block the street view is split to create interstices, through which the scenes inside and outside penetrate. Passing the comfortable vestibule, you can first encounter the corridor which runs more than 30 meters to the left and right. It is not only the interface between independent rooms and the courtyard but also the bookshelves for keeping books and a gallery for hanging pictures. Through the long horizontal windows, you can see the village-lane landscape, sometimes reading a book or writing a note. I would like to say that as a “road” rather than as a corridor.
Long House_ Episode 01 - The landform is sloped along the natural topography from the hill to the creek. The property line demarcating ownership is also curved along such topography. As the trail is blazed and the house is built, geometrical shapes come to replace the natural lines. Orthogonal lines are seen in cultivated lands as well, but their demarcating boundaries follow the natural topography as it is. We ponder about how to build a house on the two different levels of grounds shaped like terraced rice paddies. We think of building, almost like putting, it on top of the unexcavated earth: a long straight form that signifies itself as a human house like the lines of cultivated lands. Putting the house but not splitting the land, and connecting between the forest of the next hill and the fields of the village, in a way that can fully receive the care of the mother on the low hill: this is not a form of nature but what we regard as a natural scene for human beings in harmony with the natural landscape.
Long House_ Episode 02 - Before we planned to build this new house, existed a farm machinery warehouse and a greenhouse on this site, which is said to be a formerly cultivated land. The lower ground faced the village lane is smaller, but the larger upper one seemed proper for a housing site, considering the scale of area we imagined (about 132 to 165 sq. m.) and in case the parents living on the upper hill come down here and live together in winter. We decided to cultivate the smaller ground into a vegetable garden and turn the larger one back into a state of raw dirt by demolishing the greenhouse. The level difference between grounds is marked by a rectilinear slope which we regarded as a natural topography set for a long time that should be respected in its form. Of the spacious ground reserved for housing, one side is this rectilinear slope while the other side conforms to the meandering shape of the hilly forest. Placing a house somewhere in between both sides meant creating separate yards that would encounter the inner spaces of the house. Imagining how to make it visible from the mother’s house, accepting the given topography, and managing the inner yard within the hilly forest, we managed to create a long and narrow space where the new house could be put. This is why it became a longhouse.
