This project is a small 3 story wooden house in Tokyo with building space 25 sqm, floor space 71 sqm. Right in front of the building, there is a wide busy road and a bus stop. Adjacent buildings are all tall and the only open space available is the neighbor’s entrance area. Under such crowded circumstance, our mission was to find the perfect balance between privacy and openness, allowing the wind and light to fill the house. By shifting and layering the floors, small openings and gaps occur to connect the entire house. In other words, the whole house is an intricate single room. Each floor spaces are the scale of a furniture rather than an architecture, it makes you feel like you are on a large bed or a bench. As well as the inside being physically connected, the behavior upon those small floors are also connected to the outside environment.
For instance, when you sit on the 2nd floor, you can see the bus stop outside through the window, right at your eye height without being seen. When you lie down and look the opposite way, you face the greenery of the adjacent apartment. Look down towards the entrance and the shoe storage becomes your table, and you hear your family’s laughter from the living room through the small opening above. These connections bring the environment, landscape and architecture itself closer to a human scale, which nourishes a strong attachment to the everyday in this house.
