We are building a house that covers two thirds of the site, but rests on a ground floor that covers only a quarter.  Mostly that is to accommodate parking (more on that later).  Structurally the important point is that all the weight of the house has to sit on a pretty small piece of land.   Which is not a problem, except the soil on this site was not up to the task and needed to be strengthened before we could even put in the grade beams.

Translated to reality that means putting in 44 concrete piles, 600 mm round and three and a half meters deep.  In plan they follow the beams that will support the house, and arranged like this:

 

Before these can be put in though, the existing asphalt cover had to be removed

 

Then the house was laid out with stakes and strings

and finally the holes were drilled, and concrete poured for the piles

all of which took about 3 days to complete.  The last week we have been checking the construction drawings for the grade beams and the timber structure and waiting on confirmation that the concrete was sufficiently strong after a week of curing.

Next comes the form work for the ground beams.

Jijinsai = Ground-breaking ceremony.

There is no better way to start construction than a ceremony to wish the endeavor good luck.

Before tearing up the asphalt it seemed a good idea to make use of the parking surface to set up a temporary shrine.  The surreal nature of a shrine laid out over numbered parking spaces is overcome entirely by the ceremony itself.  Surprisingly moving.

Tokyo is famous for being in constant motion, always in flux, perpetually unbuilt.

Somehow it doesn’t feel that way when it comes time to actually design here.  To be fair, there is no certainty about what kind of building will be your neighbour in the next five years, that is perfectly true.  But Tokyo is not a frontier city, with large fields beckoning  to be built up with new communities -  instead most new communities (and houses) are built on infill land, cobbled together over years, or grabbed up when it becomes available.

For architects there are all kinds of implications, especially since there is no master plan shaping Tokyo at all and the location of homes and businesses is very nearly a random thing.  But perhaps the most overlooked reality is that each project is a bit like discovering a different city.  Just when we think we have gotten ahold of things, we find something new.

The site for this home is no exception.

It sits like a mushroom terminating a long and winding road.  The property itself shares half of the road with a neighbour, so that only 2 meters (about 6 feet) of the tarmac actually touches the site.  Just large enough for a car to squeeze through.  That is, after sliding under two trees, which form a green bridge of sorts across the gap between houses.  This is a rather nice effect actually, and one we hope we can keep intact even though there will be construction trucks of some size passing through.

The site itself is hemmed in on 4 sides by buildings, but we are lucky that the property to the West is currently occupied by a wedding chapel and well planted with trees.  Setback regulations designed to ensure solar access also work well for us, and the faux-brick building to the south steps back sharply, allowing an abundance of light to enter the site.

Looking further afield, a park and green space is, for Tokyo, rather abundant.  All in all, a nice place to build a house.

 

In an unofficial poll amongst a group of architects on the content of this blog I was asked to show a bit of process in our work.

The problem is that while it is a great idea, in the end so much of the process that drives architectural design is filled with stillborn images and half-complete models that finding a nice way to present it in a way that makes any sense at all is a bit of a challenge.  All those fantastic animations from BIG and OMA make it seem so easy, as if they went from A to Z in a straight line (this is one of my favorites).  The reality, for us at least, is a host of zig-zagging branches that more often than not simply stop.  I have piles of sketchbooks and decrepit models to prove it.

So for the sake of our own sanity, and out of simple recognition that we don’t have the time to make the detritus of our normal messy methods into anything presentable, we instead will simplify by showing a few sketches and models and try to explain the basic concept in a bit more detail than normal.

In the meantime, I will start in the middle, with a group of sketches for the project that marked the point where we had finally worked out the main ideas of the design.  A stack of images and models came before this and after as well, but at the end the house is going to look more or less like this.

entrance to the site

kitchen and stairs to roof deck

aerial sketch used to illustrate revised structure after original version hit roadblock

 

The why, where, and when of the house are topics I will leave for the future.

we have been busy as hens in a fox house for the past few months and blogging has always somehow ended up as the last thing on the to-do list.  Part of the busy-ness is that I was asked to do two lecture courses on planning and architecture at Waseda University last fall and as I now know from experience, speaking for 6 hours a week takes about 20 hours a week of preparation.  The course is over though and it is now break time so here I am again.   Luckily we will return to the blog with a new building that is just about to begin construction, which was really the point of this blog to begin with.  More of that in future posts.

In other news we are still finding the Yoyogi house is attractive to publications, which is a bit of a surprise, if a nice one.  It will be featured in C3 magazine in near future, and was included in the Korean version of Detail magazine last September.  If interested in the latter you can download by clicking on the cover image below (15.7Mb)

More about the new building under way in future posts.