Portal for Japanese minimalist architecture

The holes are lined up on a cross shape. The hole is made on the architecture like the perforated line. This architecture is “House with Crest”.

A light that penetrates into the architecture always moves and never stays. It is a symbolic spectacle. A light that goes through the hole is projected in a circle shape, moves unlimitedly, and never stays. Occasionally, it disappears, and it appears.

The site is located in Gojo, Kyoto. It is in a block of the typical division of a traditional residential area in Kyoto. The site faces the busy street of 4 m in width on the west side. The backside of the high-rise buildings of 45 m line up on the east side of the site. The neighbor houses are closely built in the south and the north of the site.

We “lift the one-storied house to the sky” to create calm interior space. It is lifted to 3m in the sky. The space under that is lent as a parking lot.

The one-storied house lifted to the sky makes “two outside spaces placed among three inside spaces”. The wind and the light of nature gather from the sky into two outside void spaces. And that extends to three inside spaces.

The arrangement of the spaces from the street side to the back is in such an order as “inside – outside – inside – outside – inside”. This clear arrangement works mutually and intermediately to unify the whole architecture.

The street front space is the workshop for the crest making. The middle space is the living room. And the backspace is the bedroom. The gaps between those three spaces are designed as “void”.

People circulate around those two voids. Many circular holes are made for the place where people wander. The light passes through 26 holes which are lined up on a cross shape. We can see the various scenes of light and its sequence. People move beautifully with the movement of dramatic light.

The client is a traditional craftsman who puts the crest on Japanese traditional clothes. The merchant in the wholesale store brings here a lot of Japanese clothes to ask for the crest work. He goes up the staircase that has the wall with the perforated cross line. The client puts the crest on the clothes and gives those back to him. He dashingly goes out to the town in Kyoto to go back with those. The client’s daughter circulates with the light to prepare the crest work. The movement of the circular light brings happiness of this house in.

The workshop area and the living area are separated and also connected. The client and his daughter have such living style. The crest making is a delicate work and also a business work. It is quiet, and also busy.

The drifting cloud is seen, and they finish working and relax in the living room in the middle space. The reflected light becomes an infinite line of light and extends into the darkness of twilight on both side windows of the living room. And the dark becomes deeper. In this one-storied house lifted to the sky a night goes on like that.

Two street sidewalls overlap on “Mise (show/shop)” space from the right and left as like the breast of the Kimono. The “breast” interior becomes the shop space. The circular holes made for a cross shape becomes a pattern that decorates the wall as a crest. The kind of the crest reaches 7000. Any complicated crest pattern is formed from the circle.