AD Round Up: Houses in Japan Part I

We have featured some pretty peculiar houses on AD. Many of them come from Japan. So to start this week’s Round Up we bring you our first selection of houses in Japan.

House & Atelier / Atelier Bow-Wow
As it is hard to run 3 places including the university laboratory, we were looking for a site for our house and atelier and ‘a flag shape site’ was up for nomination. A flag shape site is surrounded by buildings and only connected to the road by a narrow strip of land. It is therefore hard to plan or construct on and it is cheaper. It is a chance to utilize our past experience having changed challenging conditions (read more…)

House in Kohoku / Torafu
This site is located in a quiet residential region reclaimed on a hill of Yokohama. With neighboring houses lined very close together, this flag-shaped site meets a road at a verge of no more than 3 meters in width. Since the site is tilted to the north, and the neighboring house to the south is two-storied and built on a higher ground, at first it seemed almost impossible to let in light from the south (read more…)

House N / Sou Fujimoto
A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life inside this gradation of domain (read more…)

M house / Architecture W
Located in one of Nagoya’s more attractive neighborhoods, but with only 2.5 meters of dead end street access and set on a difficult site that steps down from this access level a total of 7 meters, M-House is designed to address the site conditions that rendered the site “unbuildable” by the local real estate community and provide for a simple, modern lifestyle for the American owner/architect (read more…)

White Cave / Takao Shiotsuka Atelier
The house is built on a hill looking down at a town area. The site’s shape has an irregular form. There is a height difference of 2m in the site. The north side is adjacent to a neighbor with this height difference. In the west and the south sides trees grow thick right next to the neighbors. And to the East, you can see the town area. Walking to the site through a path that goes side by side (read more…)