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Architects: OHArchitecture
- Area: 89 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Atsushi Shiotani
Text description provided by the architects. This is a renovation of a room in an apartment house facing Chausuyama Park in Otsu City. With a frame frontage of over 8 meters, the unit has wider frontage proportions than typical apartment buildings these days. From the main openings, one can see the abundant greenery of Chausuyama Park in the near distance and the Omi Basin, centering on the water system that converges from Lake Biwa to the Seta River, in the far distance. And on the other side, there are two openings in the building. When I dismantled the building and visited the site, I felt a pleasant breeze that was blowing through the building toward the landscape.
To maximize the appeal of the units that can feel the external environment, we decided not to divide the units into multiple rooms as much as possible. A communal house, another way of calling it a housing complex, means that it is built in a group of dwelling units. Each dwelling unit is sometimes felt to be nothing more than a collection of rooms. Rather than calling it a "dwelling unit," it might be more appropriate to call it a "group of rooms.
In this project, instead of planning rooms with independent functions for each family member, we considered how to maximize the enrichment of family life within the dwelling unit. In doing so, we eliminated the idea of the individual (one person) in all aspects of the design and adopted a method of designing purely for the functions and places necessary for living.
By abandoning the concept of a room and eliminating unnecessary partitions and fittings, we created not a small room, a desk for one person, a single bed, and a closet for one person, but a large space, a long desk, a large bed, and a large-capacity closet, creating a shared lifestyle that could not occur in an independent room. Eating, sleeping, playing, studying, working, cooking, laundry, and other activities will interfere with each other within the dwelling unit, and the place of residence will change fluidly, creating an open and airy living environment for both the family and the environment.
