House N
Oita, Japan
Sou Fujimoto, Japan
Year: 2008
Site Area: 236 sqm
Photos:
Iwan Baam
Project's description on ArchDaily.com:
"A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells
of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell
covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden.
Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space.
Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life
inside this gradation of domain.
I have always had doubts about streets and houses being separated by a
single wall, and wondered that a gradation of rich domain accompanied by
various senses of distance between streets and houses might be a
possibility, such as: a place inside the house that is fairly near the
street; a place that is a bit far from the street, and a place far off
the street, in secure privacy.
That is why life in this house resembles to living among the clouds. A
distinct boundary is nowhere to be found, except for a gradual change in
the domain. One might say that an ideal architecture is an outdoor
space that feels like the indoors and an indoor space that feels like
the outdoors. In a nested structure, the inside is invariably the
outside, and vice versa. My intention was to make an architecture that
is not about space nor about form, but simply about expressing the
riches of what are `between` houses and streets.
Three nested shells eventually mean infinite nesting because the whole
world is made up of infinite nesting. And here are only three of them
that are given barely visible shape. I imagined that the city and the
house are no different from one another in the essence, but are just
different approaches to a continuum of a single subject, or different
expressions of the same thing- an undulation of a primordial space where
humans dwell. This is a presentation of an ultimate house in which
everything from the origins of the world to a specific house is
conceived together under a single method."
