‘ Things decided, things not decided ‘ |
OUTIN
OUT INOUT/Two interiors and three exteriors
One day, on the introduction of a
friend, an elderly, quietly elegant woman appeared in my office. She said,
"Please make me a place to die."
That was a surprise. She continued,
"Please make a house that can be cut in half after I die. For my two
sons and their families."
This would not be so surprising if it
were a commission for a grave. Architects do design graves from time to
time. But this was a request for a house. A house is a place to live. What
kind of house would have death as its primary requirement? I thought for a
while.
Finally I realized that the request was
actually "Please make a place to live better through the rest of my
time." A place to live, a place to enjoy life. That was my
commission.
The requirement was not death, but
vibrant "life".
That said, architects cannot design a
way of life. We can only provide hardware, in the form of a house. So,
what could be done in this case?
Given the zoning regulations for the site, it would
be a two-story house. The mother, my client, would live on the first floor, and the
second floor would be the area for her two sons and their wives.
The
permissible building-to-land ratio determined that the ratio of interior
to exterior would be 1 to 1. But it would be boring to simply allocate
half of the site to the interior and half to the exterior. I wondered
whether it would be possible for the whole site to be interior and
exterior at the same time. (This way of thinking about interior and
exterior has something in common with the Shanghai House, an earlier
project.)
The
solution was to "layer" the garden and the interior. Starting
with units about 4.5 meters in width, I placed two interior units and
three exterior units in a line, for a total of five layers. The entire
sequence becomes one when the glass screens at
the boundaries are all open. When the screens are all shut, it becomes a
five-layer sandwich of interior and exterior. There are 16 combinations of
opened/closed. If each of the screens were further divided into its panes,
there would be 2 to the power of 24 combinations. There are as many plans
as there are combinations.
The idea is to enjoy life amid these
spatial variations as they play out against variations in the weather and
season.
On a sunny morning with soft breezes blowing, a
completely open space with no distinctions between inside and outside will
be pleasant. On a rainy afternoon, the wet stones of the walls will be
filled with light like the surface of a lake. On a snowy evening,
reflections from the snow between
the rooms will make the ceilings glow in a pale gold color.
I
thought that the solution for the commission, "a place to live",
was to provide a place for creativity and discoveries.
Smooth
continuity/Sliding doors
In
traditional Japanese houses, rooms are divided by sliding paper doors
called fusuma. (Sliding doors on the outer periphery are called shoji.
These allow light to penetrate and are also made of paper.)
Doors
on hinges are still there even when opened, but sliding doors disappear.
The difference between On and Off is unmistakable.
Fusuma marks the boundaries
between rooms and rooms, and between rooms and corridors, so that a
sequence of rooms can be transformed into a single large room simply by
opening the fusuma. Due to the post and beam construction of
Japanese houses, only the pillars remain when the fusuma are
opened.
By using sliding doors, this house affirms the unity of interior and exterior when all of the doors are opened.
The
sliding doors can also be stopped at any point to select the degree of
openness. The continuity between interior and exterior can be adjusted
gradationally,
Continuity
and separation/Floating drops of water
This
house is a private home, but three families live there, so it also has
something of the character of collective housing. Even though the families
are not strangers, so the separation is not complete.
The
first floor is used by members of all three families, and both staircases
are in the same void. The two families on the second floor are visually
connected across the glass washrooms that face the void. (You can't go to
the other side, but you can see it.)
Continuity across private spaces (the washrooms) is possible only because the residents are members of the same family. When someone wants to block a line of sight, it is also possible to lower one of the two large electrically powered blinds in the void down the first floor. A combination of IN/OUT is available here as well.
The
washstands on the second floor jut out into the void. As you are washing
your face, you can see the first floor through the water in the basins.
According to one of the second floor residents, this is an interesting
experience every morning. When seen from below, drops of water appear to
be floating overhead.
