Gallery

Description

For this residential housing project, the client desired an open space within an indoor environment. At the same time, another condition of the client was that the shape of the house should be revealed to the exterior, mainly because being surrounded by other residential houses would bring some kind of a village feeling. In fact, the actual site was located in a usual residential area surrounded by conventionally built houses.

Considering the cold climate in Hokkaido, the idea of creating large openings to the exterior was disregarded as being inappropriate as a solution. Keeping the exterior shape of the house Yoshichika Takagi solution was based on the idea of designing a space that would be ‘indoor’ but would provide a feeling of being ‘outdoors’ as a scenery within the building.

Making an open indoor space, taking in consideration the specific local condition led directly to the idea of making house-shaped indoor rooms. If these house shapes were scattered, they would emulate a village-like view. The shape of a house is a code for dividing space indoors and outdoors, and a village is a code that implies outdoors. By using these codes, the architect proposed a scenery of interwoven indoor and outdoor. After some trials, it seemed that a set of more than 3 house shapes would give a village feeling, potentially creating a relationship between indoor and outdoor.

The final solution derived from placing 6 house-shaped profiles within one large exterior enveloping the entire space. One of the six house shapes was planed as an outdoor terrace.
As a container, the big house shapes are interior, but with regular use, the composition transmits a switching feeling between the indoor and the outdoor space.

Biography

Yoshichika Takagi was born in 1975, in Sapporo Hokkaido, Japan. In 1998 he graduated at the Hokkai Gakuen University and studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture from the year 2000 to 2001. From 2001 to 2005, he worked at the N Maeda Atelier, founding his own studio in 2005, the Sekkei-sha inc. He is also a part-time teacher at the Hokkai Gakuen University.