House of shadows: ingenious and beautifully compressed, this house reflects on Japanese tradition and contemporaneity

The Architectural Review
ar+d award 2002 Highly Commented, 2002.12

The family house by Yumi Kori ant Toshiya Endo (Studio MYU in Musashino City, Tokyo is a study in compression on a very tight site to generate a quiet place, calm and a refuge from the bustling city. At the same time, it is a device to help the inhabitants become aware of nature and even the cosmos.

The architects call it the house of shadows, and multiple opportunities are taken to introduce the light of the heavens into the building, and to use it to project constantly changing shadows onto walls and floors. Pergolas, open steel stairs, lattices and wooden blinds all act as shadow-casters and gnomons. On north and south sides of the central double-height volume are water gardens for reflecting the light of the sun and moon to the interior through glass screens.

Circulation is fascinating, with many individual moments of experience packed together with marvellous economy. Consider the entrance sequence: you come into an enclosed garden from the little public court that faces the street; from there you proceed to the deck of the porch, which is covered by the balcony above; a sharp left turn brings you inside through a sliding screen; sharp right now and you are received into the tall central space, beyond which is the more cave-like living area.

There are two stairs, one inside that mounts next to the northern pool and leads to a bridge between the two halves of the upper floor; from that span, you can look down into the central space. The outside stair is approached from the terrace outside the living room. It ascends over the southern water garden to the deck over the porch. From there this very private route turns right through a glass screen into the main bedroom. The house is an extraordinarily rich three-dimensional interweaving of public and private, open and closed, solid and void, light and dark.

As well as all this ingenuity, the house is green, with the roof acting as a thermal collector, and the heavy concrete floor as a thermal flywheel. 'So', say the architects, 'we can realize a house in which one can enjoy darkness and the beauty of shadow'.

All jurors were impressed by the spatial and luminous poignancy of the place, and by the way in which it demonstrates its designers' belief that architecture exists to provide spatial experiences, rather than objects to look at.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect
Yumi Kori Tosyiya Endo.
Studio MYU. Tokyo
Photographys
Hiromitsu Kurihara, Yumi Kori
COPYRIGHT 2002 EMAP Architecture
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group