House in Hikarimachi II
A house in the site which is 5m wide and 13m long.
The offer is to create a house which a family can nestle in, even it’s small. The building’s aim was to utilize reinforced concrete and wooden structure. The site is small and skinny, and it is not rare in Japanese cities. Most of all cases in Japan are under restrictions of car parking spaces. In order to secure passage to the entrance and the parking space, bottom part of the building was constructed by reinforced concrete which made cantilever possible for the purpose. Wooden structure was chosen for the other part to adapt high humidity of Japanese climate.
The project started from an inquiry of a construction company which specialize in public works like dams and elevated bridges for bullet trains. In the inquiry, they explained that they want to create architecture which is close to the everyday life like residences by utilizing their knowledge and technology of public works. Through the research about their company and construction sites, we noticed that the biggest assets of them are the outstanding ability of construction precision and quality control, and those are invisible and shared by members of the company. In 2006, we named the project “Ie Project” （Ie means a house in Japanese.）, and our first duties was to create a housing construction section in the company. The project was aimed to realize with the budget of less than 30million Yen, and it contains purchase of a site, design, construction and the house itself. In order to realize the project, there are various rules were set. We were trying to sell the system and the rules, not the design of architecture.
