This is a house with two entrances and a shortcut, situated between an iconic townhouse and a parking lot. Related solely to its neighbor and to Venturi’s large, unrealized D’Agostino House, we opened for a linear tripartite sequence – front garden, living space, and utilities – in which one moves from automotive urbanity to the innermost sanctuary of the human dwelling.
The garden hides behind a façade that nods to its neighbor and whose mere existence is a Venturian feature. You park the car and advance diagonally to the subtle front entrance.
The living space is a large cubic space. Its direction changes abruptly and dramatically breaks up the linearity of the scheme. One glides upward via a broad stair, into the light that flows down from the large windows above.
From here, one moves either up to a second floor bed room or down to the kitchen, from which you may also jpg B escape via a backdoor.
Swallow House
The “Umbrella House” for Swallow is an elegant structure with white floating roof standing on the green park, just beside the thick gray concrete wall of Bldg. 6, which form an unexpected harmony. The idea is introduced from the ecology of swallow and the character of its habitat. Though, instead of a thick wall on which we could provide the swallow their nest, we chose the very delicate material of umbrella. It’s not only about the idea of recycling but from the studying its skeleton and organization we could get much information and relationship with this material and our target. We tried to combine them in a way that they could form a perfect geometry to hold each other as well as to create enough space and shade for swallows to build their nest.
Shimbashi
The proposal for architectural intervention in spaces underneath both the historical and the modern railway viaducts broadens and deepens pre-existing communities and ecologies, and reuses the available structures. It connects districts in eastern and western sides of the railway tracks by creating porous environment of passages in the ground floor level. These are intertwined with spaces for services such as shops, restaurants or bars, as well as rentable areas for a variety of public functions, or fully public spaces.
Ginza Exrtavaganza
What would «Tokyo Palazzo» look like if it was built in Ginza? Which spatial schemes, functional and programmatic division would fit best for the intricate needs and habits of the building’s residents and tenants? How a <<palazzo≫ would interact with the context, which urban qualities will it create and which characteristics will become dominant at this specific place? How flexible should it be to be able to suit both nowadays and future needs of society?
The spirit and soul of the area would affect building’s character and appearance which will make the typology of a <<Ginza palazzo» unique for Tokyo.
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.