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Description

This house for a couple is located on a residential area placed over a gentle hill in northern Tokyo. The site is located at the top of a hill connected with a narrow path leading to the actual building lot. Although the site transmits a particular sense of oppression and dusky feel, derived from the lot being completely enclosed by the adjacent houses, this set of apparently negative characteristic were faced as a way to preserve the house from the outside, secluding it from the city’s aggressions. Under these conditions, and in a similar way to the natural growth of trees in the forests, the most suitable way to extend the volume of the new building was upwards, in the vertical, rather than horizontally.

The Cartesian geometry typically applied in architecture, with its undeniable advantages in terms of repetitive expansion in a fixed orientation was not the best system to use in this site. Instead of using the more common geometric rules, in order to seize the subtle balance and close relationships between the site and its edges, Mount Fuji Architects decided to implement a solution based in the Polar Coordinates System, which describes the location of an element by the distance and the angle from the center of the site. This system formed a fluent hyperbolic / parabolic curve surface, entrance to the roof terrace, while functioning as a high sidelight, bringing in the only open sky toward the east, framing a neighboring house’s greenery.

The center of the polar coordinates was condensed with 32 pieces of the LVL columns, forming a large central pillar with the diameter of about 1.1 m. The interior of the house was divided into four areas, in a similar format to the traditional Japanese houses. Frames rising up spirally make variations in the ceiling height, which define the characters of each four zones. The floor level is also shifted as skipped floors according to the division of the territory by the central pillar, although the height difference is based on the topographic condition of the existing site. This house, being a direct result of strict rules of geometry, somehow achieved an atmosphere unlike any other artificial object, closely resembling the organic radial configuration of a large tree.

Biography

Mao Harada was born in 1976 in Sagamihara, Japan. In 1999, he completed his Bachelor in Architecture at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo. From 2000 to 2003 he worked in an editorial office and workshop for architecture and urbanism. In 2004 he established his own architectural practice, called Mount Fuji Architects Studio.

Masahiro Harada was born in 1973 in Yaidu, Japan. In 1997 she completed her Master in Architecture at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo. Worked has chief architect at Kengo Kuma from 1997 to 2000.

During 2001 and 2002 Masahiro worked as chief architect under a National Fellowship for Artists sponsored by the Japanese Government Scholarship program, it the studio of Jose Antonio Martinez Lapena and Elias Torres, in Barcelona. In 2003 she started to work as project manager with Arata Isozaki. In 2004 she established her own architectural practice, called Mount Fuji Architects Studio.

From 2005 to 2006, Masahiro was visiting professor at the University of Keio, COE - Center of Excellence. Em 2007 she was visiting professor at the University of Shibaura and at the University of Keio, and in 2008, she became associate professor at the University of Shibaura.