上落合の家

It’s rare to see such a small house. On a 33m2 plot, the building area is only 21m2 and the floor area is only 36m2. It looks small, and while it’s tall for a single-story house, it’s a little low for a two-story house. But once you step inside, you’ll find a large space with high ceilings, and it’s surprisingly spacious. The first floor is the living room, kitchen, and bathroom, while the second floor is half open and the other half is the bedroom and closet, and except for the bathroom, the entire space is one large continuous space.

When I first visited this place, there was an old two-story house standing there. Built to fill the entire 33m2 lot, the house was surrounded by other houses on three sides, with almost no space between the houses, making it difficult to tell where one house began and the other began. Similarly, looking around, I saw buildings crowded together on both sides of the road. It looked like a rocky mountain, with buildings of various shapes continuing in a single uneven mass.

I thought it would be possible to think of this as the natural state of Tokyo, and create a house by taking a chisel into this nature and carving it out of a large rock. Given the difficult site conditions and limited budget, I thought it would work better to think of carving out what is needed, rather than adding and piling up something.

At that time, I remembered the Ellora Caves I saw in India. More specifically, the Kailasa Temple in Cave 16. The temple was carved out of a huge rock mountain, and is surrounded on three sides by the remaining rock mountains, with a U-shaped gap around it. I remember standing in front of this incredible product of manual labor, in the scorching sun, wondering whether what I was looking at was reality or an illusion. With the technology of the time, it was probably easier to carve rocks out than to pile up materials, but temples built in this way were man-made structures, yet at the same time nature itself.

I wanted to build this house like the Kailasa Temple. Of course, that is only a metaphor. In reality, the land is cleared, the foundation is built, the framework is erected, the exterior walls are put up, and so on, and the building is built by adding on and on, but I wanted the new house to look like something carved out of the rocky mountain that is the city.

Thinking about it this way, the form became extremely simple. Then, space was created inside the carved-out volume and rooms were allocated there. I added curves here and there inside the room to smoothly connect spaces with different characteristics. Then, windows were carved from the inside of the room to the outside. A large window was placed on the wall that is angled slightly east from the street on the north side, bringing in access to the sky. On the south side, a window was placed high up to allow light to stream in from the roof of the neighboring house. In a location where the neighboring house’s small garden can be seen, a ground-level window was placed to bring the comfort of greenery and a cool breeze into the room.

The temple, carved out a long time ago on the ground of India, was filled with light and silence. It may be a tiny thing compared to the energy that the craftsmen who built it poured into it, but I too attempted to create a place of rest here, in harmony with the natural landscape of modern Tokyo.