By now I think I’ve analyzed about 20 houses in depth, almost half are Japanese and 3 from the same architect! Ryue Nishizawa’s House “A” extends the arguments I made with the Palmyra house by Studio Mumbai. It’s “Form follows comfort” in its purest form.
Let's get into it.
The Sketch: The boxes of comfort
Ryue Nishizawa’s “House A”
The Thought: FOMO in architecture
Calibrating spaceThe Work: The cost of good decisions
To compact or not compact
This Sunday’s live session will again be at 21:30 C.E.S.T.
Hope you can join me,
1. The Sketch
The boxes of comfort
The house seen from the street
Ryue Nishizawa took a narrow site that should have produced a narrow house and did something counterintuitive: he made the building less compact. He broke it into five misaligned boxes, deliberately creating more façade, more windows and more places for air to move through.
Economically, this makes no sense, but from the point of view of comfort, it makes perfect sense.
The site is located amidst a dense neighborhood of timber structures. This is not trivial, timber is the predominant building material here because there’s no vehicular access through the narrow roads.
This meant every 100 mm “H” beam had to be carried by hand and lifted into place without the use of machinery. A big extra effort in pursuit of thinness. But what is driving that thinness is a desire for an indoor and outdoor connection.
Visual connections from inside to outside
The site itself is a narrow and boxed in stripe running north to south. The default solution was to open to the front and back, but this limited ventilation and daylight. So what Nishizawa did was break down the program into 5 boxes and skew them in relation to each other along the east to west axis.
These boxes varied in size and proportions because they are a collection of living rooms. He wanted to preserve the continuity and atmosphere of the whole while considering the comfort of each individual room separately, and so adopted a rule that each volume could be a different size. As a result, they each offer their unique set of conditions allowing for people to find their own comfort by moving from one to the other.
Plan showing how one space flows to the next
Because these boxes did not perfectly fit against each other, more façade space was created. This extra façade was the opened with windows which allowed for daylight to be better distributed.
Curtains used as a means of privacy
But the reasoning behind the strategy was not daylight alone, it was ventilation. The disposition Nishizawa laid out encourages cross ventilation throughout. A strategy that is further encouraged by the sun room which has an operable ceiling window.
There are no proper walls or doors in this house, this again enforces the strategy of ventilation. Privacy is managed through the use of curtains.
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