House in Tamatsu

The house is designed for 4 members of a family with two kids. The house is placed at urban district and a small plot of only 43.21sqm in Osaka, Japan. Around the site is the mixed-use area where small houses, small factories, and small office buildings coexist together without any harmony. The client’s former house, which stood at this site, was a wooden two-story house. The adjacent sites were close and natural light didn’t enter into the old house. Therefore the client requested the family room to be as large as possible without pillars or road-bearing walls, and that natural light that comes into the house.
For structural reasons, the large openings couldn’t open out on the roadside of the first floor of the building. So, the volume of the second floor was rotated 14 degrees for the axis of the building, and interstitial spaces between the rotated wall and the outer wall of the building became voids. The skylight was positioned in the upper section of the void, and is intended to allow natural light to fall on the family room of the first floor.
Moreover, one of two walls rotated 14 degrees on the plan of the second floor is also inclined to the vertical plane, and the part which overlaps the stairs is turned up, and resembles origami or a facet. This inclined wall frees people's feeling by deviation from the norm, simultaneously the sense of touch of the degree of inclination and the light to reflect of that inclination cause a new physical sense.
The building’s white box is completely different from the building of the neighborhood. It is the appearance which the cylindrical volume of the second floor rotated 14 degrees penetrates into the building.
Box-shaped cantilevered stairs are floating in the void.