Text description provided by the architects. This is a house designed for a couple and their little son. The site is a gentle hillside in the south of Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture. The external shape is a simple square of 8.1 m × 8.1 m, but it has a complicated internal structure. We designed one big house and four small houses that extend from each vertex within it.
The four small houses are garage and bathroom, two bedrooms, Japanese style room and closet, balcony. Because they all have different volumes, the gap between the house and the house becomes a distorted crossroad like an alley. Residents can live while transitioning between small houses and crossroads. It is scenery like in a village.
We designed the exterior as a simple residential icon, but it is wearing traditional cedar boards. We designed the interior as a complex village, but it is expressed as minimum white cubes. In the suburbs of Japan including Sakai City, a residential area was built by urban planning in the 1970s, next to a traditional village. The boundary between the two communities has been aging in 50 years, becoming ambiguous. We thought that the architecture that contradictory conditions can coexist is the best for this site.
