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Architects: Arata Mino, GROUP, Yui Kiyohara
- Area: 1118 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Yurika Kono, Arata Mino
”Designing traces of daily life”- The building we were commissioned to design and renovate was a row-house-style housing complex of seven buildings built by a house builder at the beginning of the 1990s. When we visited the site, we noticed that traces of daily life were left in the seemingly homogeneous space of the row houses. For example, a BBQ set left in the yard, a stain on the wall, or a memorandum of the garbage dump. It is not only the form of the building at the time of its completion but also the fact that the sense of place changes according to the traces of life left behind by the stories of the people who live there. Normally, architecture cannot deal with the traces created by the lives of the residents after the completion of construction. However, by focusing on this change, we began designing the building with the idea of creating a new relationship between the architectural form and the lives that will be lived there.
First, think about the traces of daily life left in the house, including the forms and the story that remains there, and to create new traces of daily life, the film director: Yui Kiyohara, and the dramatist / photo-artist: Arata Mino joined the design team.
Then, the design team, actors, the dancer, and the musician lived together on the site before renovation. We used photographs and videos to record the traces of daily life in the house while we were living. Many of the scenes of life in this place are fading away, but we treated them as traces of life by capturing them in the form of photographs and video images. Some of the images were of meals, some were of plants in the garden, some were of light shining into the room, and some were of us, the designers. From these records, the “forms" of traces of daily life were extracted and collaged to create curved openings across each room on the exterior walls, a stairwell in the common building, and a door leading to the workshop on the north side. These have become "forms" that allow users to take in soft light, sit down, place things, and use them as they wish in existing architecture.
The traces of daily life left behind by the passing of time are reconstructed in the process of design and kept in this place. Of the seven buildings that have been renovated in this way, two consecutive buildings are in the shared atelier, four are in the apartments, and the remaining one is inhabited by residents from before the renovation. Currently, we, the members of us, artists, editors, and photographers live here, making something every day and renovating the building to suit their daily lives. The shared atelier is also used as a gallery and event space and is a place where people gather and open to the outside.
In the future, people living and visiting here will continue to touch the fragments of traces, such as the shadows that casually fall into the room and the light that leaks out of the building and create new traces in daily life.
