Architects: Mount Fuji Architects Studio
Location: Meguro, Tokyo, Japan
Site area: 177.27 sqm
Building area: 106.33 sqm
Total floor area: 259.72 sqm
Project Year: 2006
Photographs: Ryota Atarashi & Satoshi Asakawa

This is a house to be built in Tokyo, for a movie producer couple.

This architecture is consisted by combining L-shaped blocks of reinforced concrete and sequential frames of box-shaped engineer-wood. We put bedrooms, film archive and galley in solid concrete part for security, and living room in engineer-wood part for openness. As material that consist an open space that is 6m in height, 5.5m in width, 14m in depth, we choose thin engineer-wood (38mmx287mm).

Main theme for this architecture is to bring out a sense of mass and material, which were denied by modern architecture which pursued “white, flat wall” as a style. We intentionally left the wood grain of mold on the surface of concrete, and choose textured stones and irons.

It goes without saying that a house is a relaxing place. A house like a white-cube, surrounded by flat, white walls everywhere, gives a person very abstract image. But that image could only be sensed when we use intellective part of our brain. The problem is that we’re not all-intellective-creature. For the people like this client, who do enough intellectual labor on a daily basis, white-cube would only bring sense of fatigue. The role of architecture, especially the ones for living, is to soothe the sensory side of people, not to stimulate the intellectual side.

Architects: Mount Fuji Architects Studio
Location: Shizuoka, Japan
Site area: 988.58 sqm
Building area: 232.77 sqm
Total floor area: 380.44 sqm
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Ken’ichi Suzuki

The site locates on mountainside of Izu-san, where Pacific Ocean can be looked down on the south. The untouched wilderness, covered with deciduous broad-leaved trees such as cherry trees and Japanese oaks, gives little level ground. But we saw faint glimmer of architectural possibility along the ridge. The architecture would be used as villa for weekends.

I didn’t want to just form the undulating landscape dotted with great trees as normal, nor design an elaborate architecture bowing down to the complex topography. What sprang to my mind is a blueprint for an architecture which is perfectly autonomous itself, at the same time seems to emerge as an underlying shape that the natural environment has been hiding. It’s abstraction of nature, to say. - words from the achitect.