This house is designed for a couple and their little son. The site is a
gentle hillside in the south of Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. The
external shape is a simple square of 8.1 m × 8.1 m, but it has a
complicated internal structure. We designed four small houses that
extended from each vertex of a large house. The breakdown of four small
houses is garage and bathroom, two bedrooms, Japanese style room and
closet, and balcony. Because they all have different volumes, the gap
between houses becomes a distorted crossroad like an alley. Residents
can move in and out small houses and crossroads. It is a scenery like in
a village. We designed the exterior as a simple residential icon, but
it is wearing traditional cedar boards. We designed the interior as a
complex village, but it is expressed as minimal white cubes. In the
suburbs of Japan developed by urban planning in the 1970s including
Sakai City, residential areas installed next to traditional villages.
The boundary between the two communities has becoming ambiguous for 50
years. We thought that it was the most suitable architecture for this
site to coexist some contradictory conditions.