Joto-Ku, Osaka City
Yasuyuki Kitamura has designed a residence for a young couple, using the traditional Japanese architectural rules of simple lines, and created a sustainable open-plan house that breaks the boundaries between exterior and interior using skylights and openings within the structure of the house.
This project was short-listed for a 2021 International Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
This project is housing for a young couple, located in the northernmost new town of Minoh City, Osaka Prefecture.
Even though the area around the planned site is blessed with a natural environment, there were many houses that were unchanged from the center of the city.
The clients sought a simple home where they could feel the rich natural environment in their daily lives in such a land. It faces the road on the south side of the site, residential land on the east and west sides, and the management road of the Satoyama Farm, which was established as a buffer zone for the sediment disaster warning zone on the north side.
The green of Mt. Aogai, the northernmost point of Minoh, spreads out in the back.
In such an environment, the boundary between the building and nature was obscured, and the aim was to create a quiet home that responds to the surrounding natural environment.
The building was a one-story building with a loose gabled roof whose volume was reduced so that it could be gently continuous with the surrounding landscape.
Since the construction budget was extremely limited, the structural form was the conventional wooden construction method, all columns were 105 mm square, and all of them could be constructed with ordinary metal in the longitudinal direction, and a single inside and outside climbing beam and highly earthquake-resistant performance is ensured by using a simple left-right symmetrical frame structure with columns arranged at intervals of 1 pitch rafters with narrowed tips are used to reduce the construction period.
The team is trying to shorten it.
Paired openings, light roofs, and deep eaves expand the interior space, large toplights allow trees and the blue sky to penetrate, and nested rooms create an intermediate area that makes the interior and exterior of the building vaguer.
The two pillars that were installed in the center of the large space as a building member with a small cross-section gave the space a calming effect like a standing tree in the forest.
The architects think that it was not a method of cutting out nature as a landscape in a closed space, but rather a quiet residence as if there were daily life in the natural environment.
Project: House in Minohshinmachi
Architects: Yasuyuki Kitamura Architect
Client: Shuhei Kimura
Contractor: Takada Corporation
Photographers: Masashige Akeda
