wooden house with vista; an art of seeing

During my one year stay in Osaka, I developed (not that I hadn’t had admired the architecture of Japan beforehand), a sense of admiration toward Japanese architecture, and I mean by its broad definition, from the traditional ones up until its latest contemporaries. There are many aspects to further understood in the Japanese architecture, but among several I was able to counter during my stay and I thought was inspiring is the way the spaces connects, the way one place to another seems to gradually exposed, the way of exploring them felt like a journey, culminating in one extraordinary experience, like the one I had on that afternoon at Shugakuin Rikkyu… It was the feeling of entering, walking through, and experiencing a powerful sequence, masterly developed since the ancient times. At first I thought Ando was the one invented, or at the very least, confirmed the presence of such technique on manipulating spaces, but it was right then that I realized that the technique was intrinsic to the Japanese culture, in their art of building, in their art of seeing things. Beautifully, gradually evoking what lies beneath, slowly bringing the abstracts into physical realms, leaving us, the observant, at a loss of words.
For now, I’ll stop further writing on that subject, as that was “just” an introduction to this house project I did during my work stint at VHS Architect, fingers crossed I’ll be bringing that topic back alive soon.
The program demanded by the client wasn’t much of a trouble, but they specifically wanted that the house should apply wood as the main material, and that it would reflect the sense of being in tropical area, “Imagine Indonesia.”, they said, with several images of tropical resorts already in their mind.
What then makes this project special is that I decide to put my experiencing the sequences, as mentioned above, into practice. Starting from an open air guest area, a long corridor with a significant tree far off the site, applying the concept shakkei (borrowed scenery) of Japanese traditional architecture, and other small vistas dedicated to create an ideal sequence, all the more makes this project was interesting to develop.
I won’t deny that the images of Kengo Kuma’s Great Bamboo Wall and his Hiroshige Ando Museum lingered on my mind when I was developing this project. Those and Japanese traditional architecture are the core influences for the design of this wooden house.