While designing this house, I remembered the Rwanda forest where I visited a few years ago. It is a vast forest of the Virunga Volcanoes, where the border of the three countries of Rwanda, Congo and Uganda is, and where wild mountain gorillas live their everyday lives as they travel.
When we caught up with a troop of gorillas by the guidance of local people, they just sat down and rested among soft bushes in an open space of the forest. Infant gorillas played upon the trees and ran around among adult gorillas, while each adult settled comfortably in the grass, to groom themselves or to eat grass and tree bark. It was like a scene in a house. They found their places among dense trees and improvised their houses. Though there are no walls or roofs, trees, tall grass and creepers entwined with them, the overlaps and outlines created by unevenness of the terrain, were enclosing the presence of inhabitants, to form a comfortable density that can be called a house.
This is the vernacular architecture in the gorilla forest. What if there is such a house, in a small corner of a residential area in Tokyo? Is it possible to create a house, where a bare life is softly enclosed with layers of linear materials and objects to shape various depths, and where is a little far from the sun and eyes of people in streets?
In order to achieve it, I first decided to emphasize linear elements radically both inside and outside the house. Structural materials are exposed so that joints and bonded parts can be seen from the side.
There is no wall between the house and its garden, but a composite of windows and joinery assembled together. In addition to structural elements such as squared timbers, steel members, pillars and beams of single pipes and bracings, there are staircases, balustrades, window frames, furniture, curtains, books, clothing and other sundries, trees, pot-plants, bicycles, a watering pot, shovels, and moreover, a huge amount of books, videotapes, DVDs etc.
