Third floor is being filled in slowly but surely.

Just enough to climb on to the roof and take a short stroll.  By luck we are just a wee bit taller than all the immediate neighbours, and the view is fantastic all round.

to the west

to the east

It is a bit wet here in Tokyo this week and construction appears to be slowed in direct proportion to the volume of rain each day.

Work continues nonetheless, and the naked structure is beginning to take on the appearance of a house as bracing is put into the walls, and subfloors are nailed down.  Finally we can stand on the floors and catch a glimpse of  the final shape of the  spaces.

 

The actual construction continues to be interesting to watch.  Most recently it is the bracing that has provided the major challenge for the carpenters – not only because the pieces are massive, but also because they need to be tied together with hardware that runs at angles through both beams and columns (requiring some very long drill bits and a lot of patience).

Each tie-down is rated to take a certain amount of force during earthquake or a typhoon, and in this case with the large-ish cantilevers the forces will be fairly high at the joints, so we are putting in slightly more metal than is common.

 

The work the carpenter’s are doing is impressive and beautiful, but the spaces they are giving shape to also are looking quite good.

entry space

 

master bedroom

 

3f living room

The roof deck has a stunning view of the city on all sides. No photos yet, but if you were an adventurous sort and chose to climb up onto one of the beams you couldn’t help but notice a fantastic line of site straight towards roppongi hills on the east and likewise to a park on the west.  I am pretty much ready to move in right now, myself.

We are great fans of Cecil Balmond, the engineer who makes the work of great architects possible.  So it is fantastic luck that he has put on a one man show at Opera City Gallery here in Tokyo.

The show was interesting, more or less a reprisal of the points he makes in his book, Informal.  The most compelling piece is an installation made of a collection of nothing but chains and plates of steel, collected into a porous group of walls that form a simple maze.  The jig used to make the walls was set outside the gallery and looks absolutely simple, but still amazes me that it works at all.  Even if the engineering makes sense, it still feels a bit like magic.  The chains and the steel form surprisingly rigid walls, even allowing for quite substantial cantilevers that do not quite seem possible.

Of course we are not really supposed to take photos in the gallery, but my i-phone was in my hand and quite by accident i did take a few shots while checking e-mail.  Such a fantastic piece.

I don’t know where the exhibition is travelling to next, but if  it comes to your area this alone is worth checking out.

There are two metal braces used to stabilize the house under earthquake conditions.  A large one at the entrance and one on the third floor.

There is one more piece of steel though, a beam about 10 meters long on the third floor that is necessary not so much for pure structural concerns as much as it is for the architectural design.  The entire structure could have been designed with wood alone, but it would have meant putting columns in the middle of the living space on the third floor,  so we chose to add some steel – ensuring the space could be made into a single open room of about 60 meters squared (600 square feet).  The wood columns that do appear are placed just inside the exterior walls so they won’t interfere with anyone walking about the home, nor with placing furniture.  It is a bit hard to see just yet, but  the point will become more clear as construction progresses.

Tolerance for building is incredible here, since all the wood is cut precisely by computer, and the builders are accustomed to construction that is within millimetres of the design as it is drawn on paper.  It requires a good amount of care and patience, especially when trying to put together even a simple puzzle like this.  With this project the steel beam needs to be precise enough to match the joints that will tie it to the columns and walls in 4 points over its length.

As an aside, and you can’t see it in these images quite, but the carpenters are all wearing steel-toed Ninja boots (with the split for the large toe) apparently to give them a bit of a leg up when it comes time to climb atop a wooden column to do work just like this.  Rather impressive.

On a final note, one of the reasons the clients bought this piece of land was because it has a large green space to the West which is probably not going to be built on any time soon.  It is a curious thin,g but the best sites in this city are not only the ones that face public parks, but also those that face temples and cemeteries, simply because they are unlikely to change anytime soon and it is possible to plan for continuity.　　Luxury is a neighbour who won’t move away and won’t build anything new on their land.  In this case the neighbour is a wedding chapel – not as good as a temple, but pretty good in the scheme of things.

Up until now we have been focused on what kind of view the clients would have on the roof of their new home, but it struck us that we should check out the view from the neighbours as well.

Looks great to us!

It is usually possible to put up an entire wooden structure for a house in Tokyo in just a day or two.

Because of the complexity of this project it is necessary to take a bit more time, and at the end of every day they are just managing to complete a single floor.

In the scheme of things that is rather fast, but by the standards of our builder slower than he would like.   Taken altogether it is a major step nonetheless, and from now on the construction process will not be as visible, nor as dramatic so we are enjoying the rapid progress.  Once the main structure is in place the next few weeks we will be spending our time focusing on putting  in the bracing, sheathing the walls with structural plywood, and putting in the wood sub-floor (which is also a part of the structure), so that we will be able to call in the city to confirm the structure has met standards.

In the meantime the second floor is finished as well as bits of the third.