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Architects: Studio Velocity
- Year: 2022
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Lead Architects: Studio Velocity
A triple house with a courtyard that connects generations - Extension of a house in Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture - The owner of the building did not want the environment that his family had lived in for generations to come to an end, so he chose to continue living there by building a new building on the land where his parents and grandmother lived.
A child was born during the design process - Now, four generations - grandmother, parents, husband and wife, and children - are now living on the same land. Looking back at the records of the site, the existing main building has been expanded and renovated three times since the 1960s and has been passed down from generation to generation, resulting in buildings from multiple eras coming together to create the current environment.
As a result of considering a plan to minimize the shadow that would be cast on the site by building an extension while also ensuring views and openness, the plan was to build three planar buildings on the west side of the site, including a theater room building, a dining room building, and a living room building, and then increase the number of floors and height from the main building side toward the condominium side. The extension building was made into three consecutive buildings to create an affinity with the distorted shape of the main building, which was being expanded over and over again, and to create a small garden in the gap between the buildings.
In the gap, we planned exteriors that vary by height, such as the existing tangerine tree on the first floor was not cut down and left as a small garden, the second floor had a balcony facing the courtyard, and the tangerine tree, and the third floor had an inner balcony that views beyond the surrounding buildings. In addition to the existing main building, grandmother's building, and parking lot building, all buildings, including the newly built extension building, were arranged to largely surround the blank space in the center of the site. The central square became a “courtyard” surrounded by all the buildings and was designed to be a common place for the multi-generational residents living here to meet and meet.
Kintsugi is a repair method in which the damaged parts of a broken plate are glued together with lacquer and decorated with gold or other metal powder. Accepting the repaired item as it is and finishing the repaired areas with gold or other materials elevates the item to the point where it creates new artistic value rather than just a simple restoration. We hope that this courtyard will not only serve as a large blank space that connects the group of buildings but also that it will connect many generations into the future and that it will serve as the “lacquer of kintsugi'' that connects generations as they are used differently in each era.
