Project: House H
Architects: Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects
Location: Matsudo, Chiba, Japan
Area: 688 sq ft
Photographs by: Fumihiko Ikemoto
House H by Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects
Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, a Japanese studio, have designed the House H in the city of Matsudo, in the Japanese prefecture of Chiba. They took the design of the iconographic image of a house and they have reinvented the interior layout, more specifically, the sequence of spaces.
The construction is made entirely out of wood and it is organized by two clusters of 4 columns that create repetitive frames with two-dimensional Y-shaped column trees. They are used to separate three sections.
This is a house for young couple and their child, located in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture. Matsudo City has a background that has developed as a residential area on the outskirts of Tokyo from the 1960s. This house was planned rebuilding of the house, which was built at that time. I seemed to have been asked to build a house as a new symbol in this place by a young family with the hope of the future.
So, I hoped to propose the house as living symbol by utilizing a big roof and structural member actually in their daily life rather than just image.
At first I placed a big roof in the site, and arranged the eight Y-shaped wooden frames in it. I planned to each space by hanging second floors and loft floors from them. Like a bunch of attic beams of traditional wooden architecture, Y-shaped frames made of bonded wood run through the entire house. And the six floorboards are hung from them at different level. Depending on the level and location of floorboards, the distance from big roof and other living space will be changed, the space of under the floorboards as well. Although whole house is just one space under big roof, it divided loosely with Y-shaped frames and floorboards, so that people stay each space feeling each other.
I hope that the family uses the structure of house in their daily life and that the structure related to their daily life. For example people hanging pictures and figures from Y-shaped frames and marking height of child along his growth on it. And they will leave the trail of their life on the house like a well thumbed book.
