When I was a young student, just starting to learn about architecture I am quite certain I had a lot of mistaken ideas about what architecture could be and what it was for.  Over time experience has given me a better understanding.  Learning to understand the role of landscape however was a much more difficult process.  Not because it is that much harder to learn about, only that in most architecture offices (or at least the ones that i worked at) landscape was reduced to the bit of land left over after the building has been put up.  That was certainly the approach of my first office here in Japan, which might be surprising considering the mythical connection with nature that Japanese culture is supposed to give its citizens.

My university in Canada tried to teach me better, but it was moving to Tokyo that  was the real cure.  Dealing with the intense urban landscape forced us to be very careful with how we treat the ground and the way we manage the landscape spaces in our projects. Of course it also helps that Koen was taught architecture by one of the best landscape architects in the world, Adriaan Geuze.

In the Yoyogi house the landscape is as important as the building.  This project is no different.  The decks on the upper levels are what make the house a special place.  But what of the ground floor?  In previous posts I have talked about how dark it will be on the ground floor, and how much of the space available will be needed for cars to turn around.  That is true, but does not mean the ground floor needs to look like a parking lot, nor that the entrance to the home needs to look anything less than inviting.

Our solution to the ground floor landscape design is to create a hard surface landscape.  This is partly to keep costs down, but also to enhance the impression of a large open space.  The site is about 140m2, but the first floor only takes up about 40m2, and so we wanted to show off as much of the remaining 100m2 leftover.

Space in this city is luxury, and being able to feel that kind of open-ness is not common at all.

first sketch plan for site

preparing the site to pour concrete on ground floor

preparing the site to pour concrete

The base and the grade beam that tie the angled steel column to the house will be made into a small hill

laying out formwork to accommodate the curving entrance path

pump truck ready 
to pour concrete deep into the site.  It is always amazing that the crew are able to get these large vehicles right up to the site without damaging the tress on the street

waiting for the concrete truck to arrive

concrete is poured

spaces for cars are marked with circular stamps in the concrete

next is the path leading from the street to the house, to be filled with stones.

I love the crate the stones came in.  Usually construction materials come in neat hygienic boxes, like french fries shipped to a mcdonalds, but not these.  These are robust!

The final image is intended to be something like this.  We should see in the next few days how close we can get.

Building in tokyo is a hard thing.  In the 1970′s Kazuo Shinohara led a movement that included adherents such as Tadao Ando  and Toyo Ito which even suggested it was impossible to deal with the city in any way and that the correct decision was to retreat from it and to create an interior world that would not be disturbed by urban life going on outside poetically fortified walls.

Given the business of the city it is easy to appreciate that point of view, and certainly some beautiful and interesting buildings were made as a result.  I guess it even led Ando on the path to become the Pritzker prize winning architect that he is.  And yet it also seems to be an approach that misses opportunities.  Our work in a way is based on an experimental point of view that challenges the premise that Shinohara and Ando have followed for so long.  We think it is possible to get a lot more form urban sites than poetic  interior spaces, and we are working on showing exactly what that might mean.

In the Yoyogi House we opened the house to its surroundings, extending the street into its heart where it was transformed into a garden and then a wood deck.  The open-ness makes the home feel much larger than its 80m2 would lead one to expect.  And it creates a wonderful interior space where the owner has planted strawberries and tulips and is able to enjoy the seasons not only by noticing the rain or the snow, but by seeing the changes in the plants growing in her garden.

yoyogi house

With Minami Azabu house the clients wanted something different, and the site is in any case an entirely different type, so we took things in a different direction.

the site

Needing open room on the ground level, to turn a car on the small site, the possibility of pulling the street into a landscape did not seem right here.  The shape of the site also imposed strict legal constraints on the volume of the home, meaning it would be hard to create open space without giving up large amounts of floor area.  So instead we took a simplistic direction.  We chose to divide the home into three functional parts, and stacked them…

Still wanting to make a comfortable landscape we created a large hard surfaced open space on the ground, and placed green spaces on the upper levels.  As I explained in earlier posts this makes a lot of sense for other reasons too – in a site as crowded by homes as this one, a garden on the ground level would be very dark.

3f diagram

While the first two floors are relatively closed off from the site, the third floor opens up on three sides to decks and to a stairway that takes us up to the roof.

roof diagram

As diagrams these are quite nice, but making them work in the building itself was a bit of a challenge.  For legal reasons we could not make the floor heights very high on each floor or we would quickly go over the 10 meter limit,and for the same reason we needed to make the depth of the floors as small as possible.  Normally that is very easy, but in this case we wanted to create a cavity space in the floors.  On the third floor that gave us room to run pipes for the kitchen and the washroom, and at the point where the inside meets the outside it made it possible to have a good waterproofing detail without having to step up or down to go onto the deck.

section through deck

The way to make this all work out was to reverse the beams, lifting them up into the cavity space.  The floor remained shallow and the decks were flush with the interior floor.

substructure on 3f deck

installing

finished

We used similar details with all of the exterior decks, including the roof, which has three separate finish systems including a green roof system from Tajima roofing, a concrete block system, and a wooden deck.  Each of these has a different substructure and different requirements, so we needed to be very careful to get them to all mesh together on site.  In the end, we were able to resolve the inevitable problems that emerged on site, and the crew put the roof together perfectly.

root guard

soil containers

soil container

the soil container is built with gaps in its face to allow water to move through it.  Before filling these big sand boxes with soil the crew put in a permeable sheet to keep the soil in place as well as a layer of plastic trays that look more or less like large egg crates.  These are used to hold a little bit of the water in the soil while allowing for drainage underneath.  It is a very clever system that makes a green roof possible even on a wooden house.

installing concrete blocks

putting in soil ( a lightweight mix made by the roofing company), and railing installed on the roof

putting in soil on the third floor deck

the same deck with concrete tiles added

When it is all put together it makes for a rather nice series of outdoor spaces that extend the interior rooms out into the city, and creates a large outdoor room on the roof

two of the decks meeting on the third floor

roof deck, nearly complete

The rate of progress has steadily grown the past few weeks, to the point where the last few days have reached a fever pitch.  The number of trades are multiplied again and again,  as more areas of work are picked up.  It is remarkable to watch.  This morning the crew were digging trenches with a back hoe to put in the drainage system while 3 men carried a roll of carpet  over the gaps in the ground.  It is almost surreal.  Almost incredibly it is in fact, more or less, all part of the plan.

Last week the mortar-men put in the finish coat on the ground floor, and the painters finished the upper levels with a plasticised coating of synthetic stucco.  Which meant the scaffolding and protective screens could be taken down and work begun on the ground floor landscaping.

mixing top coat of plaster for the ground floor exterior finish…

….and applying

At the same time the mortar bed that holds the steel substructure for the wood deck was finished off…

…and the wooden stair itself is now very nearly complete, with only the front pieces remaining.

The steps will actually extend and connect the decks on the south part of the house, linking the 3rd floor to the landscape on the roof, the latter of which is also well under way.

concrete tiles readied for installation on roof

installing tiles

The roof deck is a bit complicated, and a project in its own right, so I will leave the details for a future post, and leave off with a few random images taken over the last few days

from north deck on the third floor

digging trench for drainage

One of the more important features of the house is the stair, which we have used shamelessly to make the home feel bigger than it actually is.

Getting from the 3rd floor to the roof the steps are going to be built as a continuation of the southern wood deck.  To make that possible without damaging the waterproofing layer the builder built up a protective layer of mortar, into which steel angles were embedded.  These will form the base for the wooden steps.

on the interior the stairs are treated as a ribbon of wood folding upwards.  The final finish is not entirely in place while we wait on some furniture to be installed, but it is still making for a nice effect.

Lots going on in recent days as we come up to the deadline for final inspection by the city.

Some of the walls are getting their first coat of paint…

…as are the steel frame windows.  These are to be placed on the exterior wall and when open will form a perfect opening.  In the bedroom the effect will be as though there are no windows at all and the entire bedroom can be made into a kind of balcony.

On an entirely different note, the kitchen furniture for the third floor arrived a few days ago and is being installed a bit at a time.  Surprisingly even a relatively simple kitchen like the one here is made up of a lot of parts