It is a project of a small housing complex in three households standing in Gotenyama Tokyo.
The location environment placed between the wooden house and the high-rise apartment along the noisy trunk roads. On this site, an ugly two story wooden dormitory was originally built before.
Because of the materialistic reasons, such as preventing noise pollution, cultivating heat insulation and dissolving problems of shortage about storage spaces, it was thought that the “thick storage wall” is useful. At the same time, it was also thought that how to dig the thick walls and how to connects outside environment might be important.
Lots of things were found in the stage of making models, it was one of the most interesting facts that the thick depth of the window has its own directivity. Because of this thick depth of the window, it directly appear outside views from the front side of each window, on the other hand, it suddenly disappears when people moved a little bit away from it’s front.
This phenomenon provides heterogeneous privacy distribution to inside. So, stainless steel should be covered to the depth of the window, which connects inside and outside environment more actively.
From the real exact scale model, it was found that the surrounding common outside views reflects beautifully like a kaleidoscope when it shown through the stainless steel covered thick window. Upside of the window frames reflects ground and the bottom of it reflects sky. Invisible scenery appears on it and the sequence can be through from the window to unexpected directions. Thus, a new whole environment was appeared which exceed from the confrontation between inside and outside. Any relations and distance could not be defined from this situation, which includes real images and virtual images at the same time.
When the building had completed, the landscape was discovered as a new landscape of Tokyo. Surrounding views ware all amplified.
A potential charm which should be excavated is always exists on every site. Even if it’s first impression was ugly, like this site. It is important to try to find and parch a charm of each environment through the projects.
Studio Gotenyama is the project that achieved them by re-thinking about the “Window”.
