Design3 second week

Kengo Kuma is a Japanese Architect who won the Architectural Institute of Japan Award. His inspirations are light and nature. 

Kuma’s stated goal is “recover the tradition of Japanese buildings” and to and to reinterpret it for the 21st century.

Kuma tried to imagine the house to be floating or hovering in the forest and he tried to imagine looking at the surrounding forest from the same height of the trees. Kuma had acted on the emotions and wanted to give this feeling to people in the house that they’ve been enveloped by nature and he wanted them to feel the space. 

Verticality is the key to understand his design of this house.  Even though the house is horizontally stretched it has a sense of verticality in it that makes it feel as if its suspended in the air within the nature. Kuma had used lots of vertical lines in his initial elevation drawing in order to explain his idea therefore in my sectional Parti diagram I tried to use lots of horizontal lines as well to show the verticality. I tried to show a neighbouring building and the trees behind the house. 

This is the Parti Diagram of the house that I had drawn. It shows that its a small private house surrounded by the trees of the forrest (my coffee drops which are the trees).

The house has been made out of two layers, the ground level and the first level. In this diagram, the first level which is the main part of the house has been drawn darker and the ground level which can be used as a social space or as a parking lot had been drawn in pencil.

This is a 1:100 model of the house that I made. I tried to exaggerate a bit the idea of the floating and being weightless by using the black and white colours. The black colour had been used for the heavy mass of the ground, the trees and the pillars of the house in the ground level. The white colour had been used for the main part of the house where it gives the feeling of floating. 

This is the house that Kuma made in Karuizawa in Japan. Unfortunately I couldnt find the house on google map since the written things on it were in Japanese. Anyway, we see that he had used lots of slender pillars in this building in order to give the feeling of suspension or the feeling of hovering. Because of these slender pillars the house really looks as if its floating when its dark at night. Kuma’s reference for this project was more for the idea of transparency than its neat and formal shape. Kuma has been inspired by the architect Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (Next pic comes up) and he was one of the people who had been regarded to as pioneering masters of modern Architecture. In Mies Van Der Rohe’s design we can really feel the transparency. The similarity between the two is that they both have two layers, the ground layer and the upper layer of the house.
There is a place to mention Le Corbusier’s villa savoye along with Mies Van Der Rohe. Kuma’s design has lots of pillar like Villa Savoye, the opennings and windows of the house shows the importance of the nature in the design and how it conncets people inside with the nature. An obvious difference between these two design is that Villa Savoye has been made out of three layers instead of two and the third layer is the green roof.

Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House 

Le Corbusier’s villa savoye