B.house

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B.house

Firm

Type

Residential › Private House

YEAR

2005

SIZE

10,000 sqft - 25,000 sqft

Between inside and outside
B. House is a very small two-family house
located in a high density residential area of Tokyo. The challenge was to
realize two conflicting demands; firstly the maximum living space with an open
façade in the small site and to keep the privacy and the distance to the
neighboring houses.
To achieve the maximum living space the small site of only 70sqm
had to be used up to its legal limits which would have resulted in a useless
gap-space between the houses. The Concept of the project is to use this
gap-space by introducing a semi inside outside space encasing the actual house.
This buffer zone is an extension of the living room wrapped with a soft skin
metal mesh façade at the actual border of the site. The mesh filters the light,
sight and the wind interacting with the environment like a “fog”. This “fog” keeps the distance and
softens the tension to the neighbors and also increases the quality of interior
living.
The functions are structured in three parts. On the ground floor
is the owner’s parents’ bedroom, on the first floor
the common living zone and on the second floor the owner’s bedroom. By stacking up the
rooms on top of each other the two families are able to share the small house
but still keeping their own space. The vertically organized spaces make a
rhythm of closed and open volumes because of the needs of privacy and openness
of each floor.
Structure
There are two reinforcement concrete walls supporting the house
against earthquakes. One divides the kitchen and bathrooms from the space in
each floor and the other divides the storage space. The reinforcement concrete
walls were designed to be both structural and play an important role in the
overall design. The rest of the structure was of wooden construction. The
advantages of this type of structure are the shorter construction time and
reduction in building costs. The reinforcement concrete walls also act as columns
which bear the loads of the roof floor, the second floor and the semi-inside
space on the first floor. The wooden beams on the second floor allow the living
room to be completely open without any columns. The floor and the stainless
mesh façade of the semi-inside space are hung from the beam of the roof by a
tension cable. The load is then transferred to the concrete walls through the
walls of the second floor.