Gallery

Description

The site is located at the district of the Kanagawa Prefecture, in Japan, mostly a residential area. The site is flat, small and square. Its character is almost non-existing; neither beautiful, nor ugly, neither small, nor spectacular. The client and the author intended to create a new, rich and large enough habitation space, in opposite to the former house of the client, which was not only small but also seamed small. Located in the same lot as the new project, it was demolished to make way for this intervention.

To accommodate the client requested space, the building required three stories. The volume of the house became a cube with almost similar width, depth and height dimensions, another uncharacterized feature that would make happy Palladio or Le Corbusier. To balance that, an attempt was made to create spatial depthless and dynamics inside the cube, both on the horizontal and vertical axis. Besides the interior spatial approach, wend viewed from the street the cube remained nevertheless a cube. The possibility of expressing the introspective and personal interior character to the outside was raised as an ethical question.

By itself, the cubic volume set on its location, had no feature capable to generate a way to transform its environment. To change this state, a special “guest” was invited: Marcel Duchamp’s work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, a Dadaist piece dated from 1912. This invitation wasn’t taken on a literary mode but as an inspiration, motivating the introduction of dynamic lines and images of movements into a very static space.

Based on a set of rules, the position for vertical lines was determined, regulating as well the placement of solid, half solid and transparent volumes. Besides this process, the application of an abstract inspiration to this project was on several fields on the edge of feasibility, raising several detailing difficulties that had to be dealt with extreme accuracy, for instance, the numerous places were different material confrontations occurred in obtuse angular planes. The use of white as main colour for this project was due to its neutrality towards the other materials, contributing also for an overall sense of size and distance amplification.

Biography

Tomomasa Ueda obtained in 1982 a degree in History and Theory at the Institute of Technology. Latter in 1986, attained a degree in Fine arts and Music at the Tokyo National University. In 1988 e obtained a degree in History and Theory Course at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Kenji Nawa studied at the Tokyo University of Science.