"Clip Residential Environment Out"
This is an architectural project focusing on the relationship with surroundings: to create a residential environment from a bad site situation.
The site is situated near a noisy main road, surrounded by old small office buildings, accommodations, and dwellings. It is not an ideal site for dwelling to ensure noise reduction and privacy.
To produce a residential environment in such an area, we needed to take a completely different approach from drawing a picture freely on a white canvas like an old architect.
First we put this case as follows.
Against information junk which we are inundated with, what we need to do is to choose what we really need; to create own life style. Although “originality” which architects insist is something skeptical nowadays, the quality of variations of choices can be a key; to realize a peculiarity of a private house.
A void was set out first, in the area referred to information junk, by massive polished plaster walls along the boundary. Then, windows and openings are clipped out to gain valuable information such as adjoining garden view, sky, lights, wind, etc. The quality of the choices realized an outstanding residential environment which was hardly imagined from the impression of surroundings.
While the basic composition is simple and logical, the combination with unpredictability is also important to create the peculiarity of private house design. “Stains” produced by texture, secular distortion, craftsmanship-like details contribute to the peculiarity which is different from that produced by “physical forms” which is consumed fast.
"Planning"
This is a three-storey timber house for a single family with two small kids. The centre of the client’s life, LDK and atelier with terrace, is sandwiched between lower parents’ floor and upper kid’s floor. There is no corridor which just connects room with room. Each space is connected with each other like a chain.
The kids’ floor that cannot be approached without passing through LDK, would activate the communication between kids and parents even during their adolescence.
Two kids share the kid’s floor in the mean time, but the floor is being separated in the future.
As the client’s wife, an artist undertakes use the common area as a kind of private gallery in the future, enough wall cabinets and storages, exhibition walls, indirect lightings are designed deliberately.
Kentaro Kimizuka
ME BA(waseda) PGdipl.arch(Westminster)
ARB RIBA(uk) 1st cl. architect(jp)
2006-present Kimizuka Architects, Tokyo
2005-2006 Richard Mitzman Architects, London
2004-2005 Munkenbeck+Marshall Architects, London
2003-2004 Mecanoo Architecten, Delft
2002-2003 Massimiliano Fuksas Architetto, Roma
1996-2001 Nihonsekkei, Fukuoka&Tokyo
_Architecture MasterPrize 2019, Honorable Mention (usa)
_London International Creative Competition 2018, Short Listed
_International Design Awards 2017, Bronze Award (usa)
_International Design Awards 2010, Honorable Mention (usa)
_Design Week Awards 2009, Hospitality Environment Award (uk)
_Design Week Awards 2009, Best of Show, Short Listed (uk)
_17th the Best Store of the Year, Special Award (jp)
_JCD Design Awards 2009, Best 100 (jp)