Located on the hillside of Mt. Ikoma, this private residence dominates the city of Osaka.
The goal of this project was to create a group of multiple spaces with different kinds of qualities. This allows the client to choose the uses of the spaces in each occasion by perceiving the change of the surrounding environment over the time.
The design generation process was chosen to mediate the natural and the artificial, to maximize the use of the whole site, and to create diversity of utility and experience. First, multiple boxes scaled to meet the utilities and the priorities were placed according to the contour line. Then these boxes were deformed to respond to the views, the greenery, the activities, and the surroundings, which determined the form of the building. On the surface of the boxes, grain and patterns for the concrete mold and the color and gloss of the water repellent were carefully examined and chosen to create a condition between monochrome/color and artificial/natural to magnitude the changes in hue and saturation each seasons. Difference of the sizes, views, lights, colors, and thermal environments that connectedly distributed, converts the site into a heterogeneous group of spaces.
This project composes an architecture that is highly receptive of conditions changing over time and diverse kind of values, and that suggests an optimum solution, by connecting antithetic matter – natural/artificial, limited/free, mutable/immutable, material/immaterial – in a gradient flow. In other words, this is an architecture that integrates with the body and accepts diverse of time and function just like perceptional landscape.