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Architects: Satoru Ito Architects
- Area: 223 m²
- Year: 2020
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Lead Architects: Satoru Ito
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Structural Engineering: Noriaki Yamada Structural Design Office, Noriaki Yamada
Text description provided by the architects. The planned site is a villa area in Karuizawa that was developed about 50 years ago. Surrounded by trees, each lot is approximately 1,000 m2, and the building-to-land ratio is 20%. The houses are scattered at a good distance from each other with the setback from the boundary of the site, which is unique to Karuizawa.
The area was originally a vacation home, but now the number of permanent residents is increasing, and not all the houses are lined up with their shutters closed, but you can feel the presence of people with the sounds of leaves in the trees, animals, and birds chirping. The area is famous as a summer resort, with cool but humid summers and bitterly cold winters.
It is a place with a wide range of conditions that cannot be summed up in one word, "outside. In order to secure a living space that is continuous with the surrounding environment, a shed is placed around the bookstore, and a deck and eaves are installed beyond the shed. The outer earth floor is retracted and an inner earth floor is installed, and the boundary line is multi-layered, making it easy to select and discard external factors according to the situation.
The structure is constructed with a rigid-frame structure to reduce the number of earthquake-resistant elements, thereby increasing the degree of freedom for modification. Once only the minimum framework is prepared, the client will pick up various things and continue to modify them according to the changes from time to time. We thought that architecture could be made more long-lasting by considering it as something that accompanies the flow of time and changes in daily life, rather than as something that is built for completion.
