Text description provided by the architects. A single house alone cannot create a rich living environment. The Machikado Project is a project that aims to create a good living environment by designing a group of houses. This article introduces the "Machikado" project consisting of six houses in Asahi-cho, Kagamigahara City, Japan. The roads there become gardens, and the gardens of each house are connected to each other, making the whole area look like a park.
Today, Japanese houses are built separately on each site, like isolated islands, and as a result, I think we have lost the wisdom and ingenuity to live in a shared environment. We wanted to restore the community landscape and the structure that supports it, as in the old villages.
We were fortunate to come across a plot of land measuring 1,395 square meters, and the landowner was also sympathetic to the idea of Machikado, so we were able to start the project on the condition that the landowner's house be built in one corner. Including the landowner's house, there are a total of six houses, with each house having a plot area of about 230 m².
There are many problems with designing a group of houses. First of all, all houses are required to have a road frontage of at least 2m, so houses cannot be scattered freely on a large site. However, there was resistance to drawing a public road into the site.
So, the following solution was considered. In other words, the road width required for the four houses at the back, excluding the two houses on the roadside, is 2m each, for a total of 8m. This 8m of access road was bundled together and made into a large shared garden as a common space. In addition, there were old chestnut trees and mandarin orange trees growing on the land. So, we decided to plant more fruit trees and turn the common space into an "edible garden."
When you experience designing "street corners," you realize that your previous experience designing detached houses is not very useful. Rather, the hint lies in the "construction" of townhouses and farmhouses of the past. When you look at old floor plans of fishing villages and rural settlements, you can see that the framework and orientation of the house are more important than the individual plans. There, the structure (skeleton) comes first, and individual lifestyles (plans) are discovered later. I think our predecessors decided that it would be more advantageous for houses to be built next to each other while sharing the environment. Following their example, we also thought of "standardizing the skeleton rather than the plan."
The six houses are made up of three types of skeletons: 3.5 x 4.5 bays, 3.5 x 4 bays with a "detached building," and 4.5 bays on a corner. All six houses have single-pitch roofs, and the direction of the roofs varies from east to west, north to south. As a result, the roofs of the six houses form a wave-like silhouette, creating a continuous village landscape.
