[Nishioji-Hachijo] Villa Saitan

This is a housing project of 11 units for one person that built in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto. This architecture is built in the alley of Nishioji-Hachijo, where the town houses of about 100 years of old slightly remain.
An open space is arranged on the alley side of the site. A street garden is arranged in the center of the architecture. It connects the open space to the courtyard of the north side neighbor town house. This area still keeps peripheral air since old days, though the number of the high-rise apartment and the multistory office building are gradually increasing.

1. We intended to design the group of the independent small house as one big house.
2. We intended to present the architectonic integration that did not seem to be an apartment house.
3. We pursued the design that can be accepted also by contemporary people in the historical city Kyoto.
4. A usual segmented apartment house tends to have unfriendly atmosphere. We pursued a presence and　vigor of the architecture that overturn such a conventional image of an apartment house.

　Therefore, tree was chosen to be a motif. The housing main entrance is a root of the tree. People enter from the root to the inside. The entrance is arranged with the street garden style that seems to be town house in Kyoto. The trunk grows from the root, and it stretches out dynamically to the sky. Around the slit, there are windows of the leaves and the flowers. 11 housing units are distributed to the interior of those leaves and flowers. The design of all housing units is different.

　We strictly studied the shape of the openings concerning its direction, its edge sharpness, its curve line form, and the total relationship of those. What we pursued is not the ambiguous shape of seeming the tree somehow but the strongest and the most dynamic shape among all possibilities.
　We pursued the shape by which anybody could understand that this architecture was the tree and that the architectonic concept was a living on the tree.

　As for the leaves, the flowers, and the trunk, all shape is different. Therefore, all form of the light inserted in the room through these is different. To recognize the effect caused by different shape of the windows, you may imagine Yoshinomado of the Japanese tearoom that is the Japanese traditional window. Scenery outside and the sky impress people clearly by the characteristic window shape. Moreover, because the window is at a high position of the room, the inside is not seen easily from the outside.
　This architecture has the pleasure as like living on the tree. And it gives also the sense of security requested from the residence of living alone at the same time.

　The size of site is width 16m, and depth 19m. We designed the tree that extends up to the entire site. "Tree Housing" shows one solution of the low-rise housing project in a quiet but densely built residential area.
　This is a challenge to the contemporary architecture to open a new door
to the history of the site.

Housing for one person with 11 units in total
Site area;302m2
Total floor area;557m2
3 stories above ground
Reinforced concrete construction