KA.house

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KA.house

Firm

Type

Residential › Private House

YEAR

2006

SIZE

10,000 sqft - 25,000 sqft

The
house is located in a quiet residential area in Tokyo facing a side street. In
this area most of the houses stand on a site of around 70 to 100 m², which is becoming the
standard size of land for single family houses nowadays. In recent years more
and more residential lands in Tokyo are subdivided into small plots like this.
According to Japanese building laws a building has to be built with a setback
of min. 50cm from the site boundary. This law applied to such small plots
creates the typical Tokyo scenery: a row of houses next to each other with
small gaps in between. Since most of the houses are built on the maximum usable
area within each plot these strange gaps happen. From the point of the land use
this way of building is not effective, because the gaps are unusable leftover
spaces and it doesn’t provide any good living qualities for the surrounding
environment. We found that the building and the land are not interacting well
enough with each other. From this point of view we tried to deal with such
leftover space as a positive inspiration for our design. Our main focus for the
planning was to create a positive relation between the building and the land.

The
level of the building site is one storey higher than the adjoining street. So
it was necessary to introduce reinforced concrete retaining walls against the
earth to create a basement floor on the street level. We extended those
retaining walls till the middle height of the ground floor as boundary walls to
the neighbor. By designing the first floor as a floating volume in the air we
suggested an open living space on the ground floor surrounded by the retaining
wall and the volume above. The interior of the ground floor is fully surrounded
by glass walls and there is no massive wall which would normally show up.
Between the glass and the retaining walls there is a terrace made of steel grating,
which allows the open living space to extend to the maximum boundaries of the
whole site. By covering the maximum site area with the living space we could
avoid making unusable leftover space in the site and made a new relation
between the building and the small site.

The functions are divided
vertically; parking and entrance in the basement (street level), living room,
dining and kitchen on the ground floor, bedrooms and bathroom on the first
floor. While the outside parking in the basement continues as a slope to the
ground level, glass surrounded entrance hall leads you up to the open living
room on the upper floor. The inside and outside space interact with each other
along the movement. The volume of the first floor with its pitched roof forms
the main appearance of the house. This floating volume is 1 to 2.4m setback
from the site boundaries so that enough light and ventilation can be provided
for the ground floor and through the grating for the basement.