House NA, Tokyo, 2012 by Sou Fujimoto
One of a series of short accounts of innovative houses from 1500 to the present prepared for an unrealised book.
A house with hardly any walls? It’s hard to imagine but that is exactly what Japanese architect, Sou Fujimoto, created for a family in Tokyo in 2012. The house stands at three storeys tall, yet each of these storeys is subdivided into different intersecting platforms and floors. In plan and section the house appears highly complex, even disordered, but when seen when walking down the street it achieves a surprising coherence and unity. It’s a startling bold intervention, but one which at the same time merges into its suburban surroundings.
The radical interaction between inside and outside that is this house’s most striking characteristic is a recurring concern for its architect, Fujimoto. It is informed by his broader interest in the intersections and discontinuities between what he sees as the two ‘fundamentals’ of architecture and nature — and in finding their ‘in-between space’. This is manifested most frequently in his work through the idea of a forrest: in a residential tower block imagined as a super-sized pine cone; a bus shelter composed of thin tree trunk-like verticals which the user is invited to climb; installations of suspended metal cubes from which trees actually emerge; and in his Serpentine Pavilion in 2013 which comprised a geometric lattice of box-like structures that appear to float like a cloud, merging effortlessly into the green surroundings of London’s Hyde Park.
The concept for House NA is, however, a single tree. Rather than being stratified into a series of discrete layers, Fujimoto sees the branches and leaves of a tree as a multitude of different planes at variety of different scales. These planes, moreover, exist both individually and as part of a broader collective, intersecting and overlapping with each other. This provided the inspiration for the house’s composition as a series of interconnecting zones perhaps ultimately defined by their activity, whether for sleeping, doing the laundry or just watching TV. Like the branches in a tree, these zones exist as both separate entities and as part of a broader whole. Voices carry easily through the house like a bird hopping from one branch to another. The different planes created by the steps up and down serve to both demarcate a zone of activity and in some instances become part of that activity, functioning as a desk, a bench or somewhere to place things. Where walls are necessary for purposes of security or shelter, they are made of glass, allowing light to filter through the house’s structure as it might filter through the leaves of a tree.
It is pretty clear that a traditional type of privacy is not really possible in this house — and that is in many ways the point. The house exists in response to our increasingly digitally interconnected world and ways of living — at once strikingly contemporary but also harks back to an earlier more apparently primitive form of human existence. Above all perhaps, it is a house conceived to break down the barriers between home and the city, between our material bodies and the possessions we surround ourselves with, between, architecture, as an emblem our artificial synthetic world, and nature, the wellspring of our souls.
© Owen Hopkins 2018
