Single family house | Kazutaka Wakamatsu
Japan | 1995 | soft use
| Address: | Osaka |
| Context: | new built |
| Location: | urban |
| Number of Storeys: | 3-storey |
Description
The single-family house illustrates a generic principle of a house that is organised around a central staircase with a series of rooms coming off at various levels. The house is entered from the street, into a small hall and via a sliding door into long narrow room that accommodates the kitchen, lit from above by a lightwell. The vertical circulation rises directly out of the kitchen and, together with the space taken up by the light well, divides the house into two parts of the same dimension. Also on the ground floor, towards the rear of the plan, is a storage room and a space for a car.
Going up one level, there are two rooms, one immediately to the left of the staircase and another one that is accessed from the small gallery, open to below, that runs past the lightwell. The next level up has two more rooms, again to the left of the staircase and another one at the end of the corridor and also has a row of storage cupboards along one side of the corridor. Whilst some rooms have specific functions attached to them, one could easily imagine the house to be used by a group of unrelated adults, two couples sharing or even as a live / work unit with the garage converted into an office space.References
'Acht einfache Wohnhäuser von Yoshiyuki Nishimiya, Yuzo Osumi, Kazuhiko + Kaoru Obayashi, Yumiko Kobayashi, Kazutaka Wakamatsu, Soichiro Kawabata, Yoichiro Miyamori', Bauwelt, 86, 1995, pp. 2444-51.