Stove

As a once archetypal household element, the stove has gradually become invisible in contemporary housing, with open-flame cooking disappearing into glasstop IH stoves and heating being concealed in the floors. Simultaneously the energy supply system has grown into an extensive and cohesive global network, at once distant and thus invisible to its end users yet heavily transforming the hinterland. Until the end of the nineteenth century the network was tangible and concrete: firewood was acquired from the forest, purchased by each household and used for the stove, and afterward the ash produced was re-collected by ash-traders for other uses such as sake brewing. From around 1960 Japan increasingly imported liquefied natural gas via tanker ships as an alternative energy supply, requiring a complicated gas-supply infrastructure, along with urban renewal, including shipyards, pipelines, gasometers, etc. Today the power system is a hybrid one, fed from multiple resources, including atomic power and renewable energy, making the network evermore extensive and abstruse.

Partition

The history of the exterior partition-wall in the Japanese house seems to run in an opposite direction to the modern European one: from a succession of spatially differentiated thresholds to an overall technical ensemble. In the pre-modern period the building envelope was defined by its rich depth, which often embraced the entire house and its garden, forming a multi-layered and porous interaction between outside and inside. The enclosure of the post-war Japanese house, on the other hand, is reduced to a solid wall assembled out of mass-produced elements, leading to the collapse of the spatial multi-layeredness and its replacement by several functionally clearly delimited elements, namely the compact wall and its various openings, such as sash windows, air-conditioners, steam outlets, etc. In recent condominiums the wall has become defined by its increasing technological dependence, with a double, often contradictory goal: an ideal tightness of the enclosure and a series of highly controlled openings, gradually cutting off the inhabitants from their natural outside environment while creating a highly artificial one on the inside.

Mori In Jiyugaoka

MORI IN JIYUGAOKA
During the mapping of the various activities, we found that Jiyugaoka has a very season- al characteristic. The areas change over time, from morning to evening during the day and from weekdays to weekends.
Jiyugaoka is known for its trendy, fancy and cute shops and cafe’s that are targeted more towards the women and yet promise to offer a quality ‘Den-en-chofu’ lifestyle to its residents.
In our study, we found that there are not that many gardens or green spaces and this inspired us to create an accommodation that allows one to ‘escape’ into a ‘forest’ in the heart of Jiyugaoka.
The design is an accommodation that personifies ‘living in the forest’. It amplifies luxury living in Jiyugaoka and gives its visitors a feeling of sleeping amidst the trees and isolation in the otherwise crowded surroundings. Through our design we wish to bring back this feeling, to show how import- ant it is to get lost in these experiences and just get away from all the hustle and bustle of everyday life and enjoy the solitude while im- mersed in green.