9X9 Experimental House / YounghanChung Architects

Architects: YounghanChung Architects
Area: 93 m² Area: 93 m²
Year: 2013 Year: 2013
photographs: Kim JaekyeongPhotographs: Kim Jaekyeong

Text description provided by the architects. Long ago, in his Building, Dwelling, Thinking; Martin Heidegger used a few buildings to discuss their relationships with dwelling.

"These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today's housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today's houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?"

This project began with the following two questions. Can we really achieve any residentiality in the conventionalized universal space for residence? And as for the program that provides a seventy-year-old female painter with residence and work space, what is dwelling as a small place where to spend the last one's life

This project deals with the first experimental housing that can have another type of universality through new interpretation of area, furniture, and boundary in an existing residential space. The first area of dwelling is defined by furniture. Specifically, the function if furniture defines area, the space where a sofa and TV are placed is defined as the living room and the space where a dining table and kitchen furniture is determined as the kitchen, while the space with a toilet and a wash basin is marked as the bathroom and the space with a bed serves as a bedroom.

Breaking out of this set of pre-defined areas, I have made sure that a user can take an active role in defining areas by means of Furniture corridor. Here, the furniture corridor with 600 to 800mm furniture is a device designed for storage with minimum functions, and it accommodates in the residence furniture, hygiene, electricity, facilities, ventilation, cooling and heating systems. The furniture corridor in the 6x6 House ( another experimental housing project ) adds vertical expansion to storage functions to include stairs, pet dog, and landscape. The areas that are adjacent to the device is to be defined by the function of the furniture when it is used with the opening and closing of the sliding door and moving wall installed in the furniture corridor, and when not in use, it serves as a variable area that can be converted to some other area. Second, Boundary in dwelling marks out furniture-defined areas with physical walls to secure traditional privacy and characteristically has a clear division in the outdoor garden between outside and inside.

Yet, begun as a strict geometric configuration of the boundary ( the architectural archetype ), the 9 meters by 9 meters is in fact intended to conduce to deconstruction of the boundary between inside and outside through the porous composed solely of the two sizes of 1.8 x1.8m and 1.2 x1.2m. Previously, through a 1.8 x1.8m porous structure applied to the facade of some other project as “POROSCAPE”, we tried 'transparency through the porous'. For surrounding outdoor environment, as a borrowed landscape merges with the garden of the inner courtyard, the physical exterior wall as a 9x9 geometric delimitation of the area undergoes gradual dissolution, thereby bringing residents in contact with some primitive scene of dwelling in nature. The dissolution of some other inside-outside boundary transpires in the area composed of glass wall between the furniture corridor and inner courtyard.

The glass wall keeps in contact with outside phenomena while zigzagging along the inner courtyard. As for the outside garden situated between the inner and outside areas, the boundary between inside and outside blurs, while light comes in through the 1.2 x 1.2m porous installed on the ceiling slab and advances further inside to drape shadows for the invisible border wall, or with rain or snow.