9X9 EXPERIMENTAL HOUSE
The house, which began as a geometric plane with the perfect system of nine partitions, is my first project in building a house. I have my personal belief in the validity of geometry that creates further possibilities, just like Louis Kahn demonstrated a possibility of unitary spaces with his Trenton Bath House (1955) that presented Andrea Palladio's geometric system. And it also stands for my first experimental project concerned with how it remains close to dwelling to let it work as a house through the seven paths that approach the essence of dwelling: nature, place, border, distance, behavior, furniture, and minimal architecture.
The house has a two-storied hierarchy: the ground floor has the typical space structure of the first house while the second floor has space structure that would create another kind of universality as the second house. 9X9, that resembles the shape of Mandala, is an arrangement for creating the possibility for a new space structure in the area of absolute geometry. The 9X9 plane is encircled by a furniture corridor, which is the crucial concept in the house designed to invert the designated behaviors that accompany the defined area through furniture arrangement. Accommodating simultaneously all functional products and behaviors in a house, the concept may be applied in variation from 750mm to 1000mm depending on the scale of differently-sized pieces of furniture, and another house project (6X6 house) currently under way accommodates stairway, outside space, and other behaviors for a vertical connection of lines of movement. The space of the second corridor with a breadth of 1,000mm to 1,200mm, which abuts on the furniture as the sliding door or the moving wall opens and closes, is not just for a line of movement for mobility but can vary depending on the use of furniture. When all the variable doors of furniture corridor are closed, the existing space is either replaced with an arbitrary area to be created by another behavior or converted to one incorporated area.
Also, with this house, I'd like to suggest a few methods for blurring the border between interior and exterior. Firstly, the heterogeneous interior areas are composed of the transparency of glass, so as exterior is inserted amidst the expanded interior spaces, new spaces are created while borders blur through respective arbitrary areas. The exterior spaces inserted into the interior constitute another exterior in the interior that lets us experience the external phenomena through the porosity on the ceiling that is composed of 1200x1200mm and 1800x1800mm modules. Secondly, the porosity module that shrouds the exterior wall of the house creates the illusion that the outside landscape smoothly has come inside and one is in natural settings. Like this, the visual experience of the landscape that has come in through the porosity gets boosted through the repeated sequence of interior and exterior.
The interior area that follows the furniture corridor has no partitions or doors separating rooms; it distinguishes areas by the 150mm difference between floor levels. The transparency of the glass that forms the interior area creates another sense of physical distance in the dwelling space, while the exterior gardens that permeate the interior have their exclusive sky thanks to the porosity on the ceiling. The light percolating through the chasms comes inside to shed the shadow of the invisible wall, or soaks its body in the rain in a wooden bathtub that resembles the size of the building located in the garden with ambiguous inside and outside, or the silent winter-long snowfall whitewashes the interior space. Experiencing all these phenomena will be possible in another arbitrary area that would excite the primeval experience so far latent in nature.
The light percolating through the chasms comes inside to shed the shadow of the invisible wall, or soaks its body in the rain in a wooden bathtub that resembles the size of the building located in the garden with ambiguous inside and outside, or the silent winter-long snowfall whitewashes the interior space. Experiencing all these phenomena may start in this place dwelling through the primeval experience, which has so far been latent in nature.