PROJECTS

Kanon is a small apartment house located in a densely populated neighborhood of wooden houses near Nishi-koyama Station in Senzoku, Meguro Ward, Tokyo. A large part of the site, which used to be around 85 square meters, was lost to the land acquisition for starting a city planning road project, leaving an irregularly shaped 35 square meter site. The district around Nishi-koyama Station used to be a town where each street had its unique character, whereas now, small old-fashioned shops are being demolished to be rapidly replaced with new small housing complexes and large vacant lots.

The client requested to create three units in total: one for their mother, who has lived there all her life, and two units to be rented, each with a loft. In addition, the ground floor was designed with the prospect of opening a shop in the future where they could sell organic fruits that they would grow. Combining such requests with the slant-line and shadow-casting regulations, we decided on a small 10.8-meter-tall house with a deformed gable roof. It is also a fireproof building as the site is within the Special Fireproof Promotion Area. Fireproof buildings tend to have their wooden parts entirely covered by membrane fire-resistant coating unless special techniques and certifications, such as CLT, are applied. Therefore, we concentrated the loadbearing walls with a membrane fireproof structure around the plumbing and loft areas while concentrating the openings and exposed wooden texture around the 1.5-story-high room area. As the exterior walls on the north and south sides consist of three layers of 12-millimeter calcium silicate boards complying with the Fireproof Construction Notice, we constructed a wooden rib wall made of two-by-four material and conifer plywood. The soft two-by-four materials are human-friendly as they could be easily customized by the residents, for example by installing shelves. Moreover, because we placed multi-story spaces on the east exterior wall side, it was necessary to install iron rods in each room to ensure wind resistance. However, by giving them the same cross-sectional performance as horizontal bars, residents can use them for pull-ups for health and psychological benefits while working from home, hanging clothes, or as a rail for hanging a partition.

The exterior consists of a hot-dip galvanized staircase that sits over the ground floor volume and giant eaves above it; three doors, each colored in red, yellow, and green recognizable for the aging mother; a 10.8-meter-tall fireproof galvalume wrapped around a volume that is relatively taller than the surrounding buildings due to providing lofts on every story; and a combination of a gable and gambrel roofs created to suit the third-floor loft.

Through a jazz-like session where each element, indoors and outdoors, behave freely on its own term, we hope to see new interactions that derive from and resonate with the area's unique culture.