The place where we plan to build the house is located in a residential area where there are old-style tenement houses in Amagasaki-city Hyogo-pref Japan. Around there width of road is narrow (about 4 meters), and houses are dense and have a poor view. Our client’s grandparents, childfood-friends and fellow pupil live the same area, so the client has good neighborly relations with them there. We planed to build the house at a corner site as 80㎡ to produce joyful life for our client with their children in their familiar area.

In the “Sumikiri-house” we cut the corner at the ground floor to provide garaging space, besides the corner cutoff makes a good space where have a good visibility even in the dense area, so we can ensure a security for surroundings and reduce oppressing feeling there. We use a plain-woven iron grating on a façade over the corner cutoff to provide a relieved feeling by mixing the iron’s robustness and the woven fabric’s softness. We designed the upper side of the corner cutoff with a moderate size which makes no oppression but good perspective to reduce oppressing feeling in the dense place as much as possible. The plain-woven grating of the façade has a moderate balance of security and transparency and it ensures both the client’s privacy and good relation with their grandparents and neighbors for the client. Through the grating they can easily have a conversation between the client family inside the house and neighbors outside. So they can keep a nice relationship among them in the traditional way of conversation. In addition the plain-woven grating provides the both privacy and opened feeling for inside the house, too. Although the grating works as a partition, it provide a brightness and a perspective with inside the room where is not large. In a future we plan to plant some greens on the grating and the greens adjust sunshine in both summer and winter season to reduce thermal loading. We design the grating as getting larger the grid in accordance with its height to produce brightness and opened feeling at the upper side. So the client can feel an extent of the house due to the perspective grating. In R-floor we design the room with no dead ends for migration. The roof is a bit thin so that we can use it as a table. So the client can deepen exchanges with their friends by enjoying an afternoon tea and snack with chatting around the table.

In summary “Sumikiri-house” achieves a moderate distance and relation between the client and their neighbors. The design of the corner cutoff and plain-woven grating achieves both transparency of perspective visibility and secured privacy in addition to use the narrow space as much as efficiently. We believe “Sumikiri-house” makes good influences for all over the dense housing area and helps spending happy life for not only the client family but also their neighbors.