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Architects: Office for Environment Architecture
- Area: 89 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Yohei Sasakura
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Lead Architect: Norio Yoshinaga
Text description provided by the architects. Transformation of unconnected environments - A painter who draws Mt. Fuji in someone's bath told me that he had found three "warehouses" for sale on a real estate site at a bargain price, so I went to see it. It didn't seem to have been used as a residence, but the fact that it had a simple kitchen with the purchase tape from the home center and a brand-new toilet was a real added value that ``can be used as a residence.'' It seemed convenient, but it did not meet the performance as a residence at all.
The site is located in a semi-industrial area about 200m from Osaka Bay. In the surrounding area, facilities such as old sake breweries, factories, and workshops coexist with residences such as detached houses and condominiums. Older people continued to live in the wooden houses that were not even connected to the neighboring neighborhood, but there was still a good amount of interaction with the neighbors through the alleys.
The existing building was built in 1975 and has been renovated many times, it has been expanded and partially reduced. There were many places where amateurs were involved, and it was structurally unstable. I could imagine the impact of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, but I could feel the strength of having survived everywhere. Since the budget for the renovation was extremely limited, the residents and friends spent a little over a year doing DIY work every weekend to restore the house to a livable environment. Construction started in the early spring of 2020. Experiencing the comfort of the wind blowing as it changes over time from the sea to the mountains.
I made it in the summer, and it became extremely hot under the tin roof, so we quickly filled the ceiling with sufficient insulation. In autumn, the exterior walls, which were still damaged by the typhoon that caused great damage in the Kinki region in 2018, were temporarily finished by overlapping the furrings used as the base material. It was ready to live in in the winter, but there was still a lot of construction left to do, so it was the second spring.
The season repeats itself, and in the spring, I was tempted by the comfort, so I removed part of the roof on the first floor of Hanare, which had been badly kept out of the rain, and installed a movable skylight. Although it does not meet the road contact conditions, it is in contact with various surrounding environments. Small repairs involve the surroundings and spin into a place where you can live. Although it is a small block, if you think of the whole town as a house, you can feel rich in life. As soon as the family started a new life, stray cats began to visit the house, and after a few months, they began to sleep in the house at night. The cat spends the day somewhere in the city and lives in the city block. By placing oneself in a certain environment at the site and repairing it, there is a barbaric and primitive frontier that discovers the value of working with the existing and inheriting it to the next generation.
