Site Specific: House i

Studio Shunsuke Kimura - Tokyo, 2019

SSK We renovated a 60-year-old shop-cum-residence in Tokyo into a three-family house. The site faces a shopping street, and the owner has been running a rice shop on the premises since the sixties and has been living in close contact with the surrounding residents. We chose to renovate the house rather than rebuild it so as not to lose the ties that had been nurtured over the years. We divided the accommodation into two sections, one on the first floor and the other on the second floor, and set these behind a new, double height atrium which acts as a threshold between the interiors and the street.

Something Invisible

Every grandmother's house has its own unique memories. For me, my grandmother's house was also a strange house filled with objects, unused rooms, inaccessible rooms and a lot of things that I could not grasp. And along with all these things, there was also something invisible. It lurked in the gaps between things, hidden from view in everyday life. In the past, it would have been a place where ghosts and goblins lived.

When I visited this house for the first time, I was not sure how to proceed with the design because the "invisible something" that I could not fully grasp covered the interior of the house with a presence that eluded me. After being occupied for so many years, the interiors had become densely inhabited with many objects and items of furniture having been added over the years. The outlines of the rooms had become indistinct. The real space that we can see has been covered up by the imaginary space that we cannot so easily apprehend.

The client wanted the house to be brighter, to be barrier-free and less hazardous to occupy. I wondered if the house, which was now clean, tidy and emptied of its contents, hadn't actually retained traces or accumulation of the past life. Therefore, the design process began with facing the "invisible something" that I felt when I first visited the house and by thinking about retaining a place for it so that it would not be removed along with the luggage and other things that would be lost in the future. I also wondered if it would be possible to manifest the "invisible something” in some more tangible way. I wondered if it would be possible to create something that could be a mysterious object that is hidden but still exists, that could be a familiar yet unobtrusive part of daily life.

Invisible things

A new, inner façade was created, set back from the street and facing onto a new double height atrium space. With its earthen floor, this space acts as a buffer between the street and the more private rooms towards the rear of the building. Two large white ceiling ‘slabs’ were inserted behind this façade and the height of the first floor was adjusted by lowering the floor to make it barrier-free and creating a large pocket in the ceiling.

The material used for the ceilings is a hardened diatomaceous earth. It comes as a sheet with standardized dimensions, so the maximum size is set, but the original material itself has no size limit. Carefully assembled together, the elements imitate a single mass, suggesting an original form nested within the structure of the building.

When you think about whether or not something is massive, even for a moment, you imagine what's inside. If it is a real solid material, the visible surface and the content are the same, but when one realizes that it is a fake, one realizes that something different from the material on the surface is lurking inside.

The interior walls are made of plywood. In the detailing of each component, the pillars, which should be solid and thick, become only the surface by eliminating the displacement. The plywood, too, loses its thickness, and only the first layer of plywood is recognized as an existence. In this way, we can imagine the thickness of the pillars and plywood that should be there and at the same time become aware of "something invisible" inside the wall.

In this way, I tried to create a place for the "invisible something" by erasing the existence of the inside and thickness from the surface. However, the interior and thickness actually do exist of course and are filled with various things such as structural materials and services. In the atrium with the earthen floor, old beams and baseboards appear, creating a place that is really a transformation of a place that used to be a void; where invisible things can now be seen. The simultaneous presence of the invisible contents of the ceiling and walls and the exposed earthen floor space complements the missing contents and thickness, and the way the contents are created is constructed in the imagination. The "invisible something" is created as an object and exists in that place. By combining the invisible fictional existence of the inside of ceilings and walls with their existence as objects, they will become an everyday presence that makes us aware of their immediate presence in our daily lives.

In our daily lives, we are not aware of the contents of the ceiling or the thickness of the walls, and how they are made will be forgotten once the construction is finished. It is precisely because a house has been loved for a long time that the attachment and feelings for the building accumulate and cling to the building. Showing the remaining old structural materials as they are and loving them in our daily lives is one way to pass them on, but the materials that have been exposed to the fresh air for the first time in decades are soon consumed in our daily lives and slowly disappear outside of our consciousness.

Things that have been hidden and are no longer visible can only be seen in the imagination. It is precisely because they are not usually visible that they happen to emerge into a curious presence in our daily lives. When the demolition begins things that have been invisible until now will appear and the history that has been locked away will come to light. If those things that secretly supported the building up until now, existing behind the scenes, are responsible for the history of the architecture, perhaps its possible to involve them in further invisible fictions and preserve them for the future?

NOTES

Huge thanks to Shunsuke Kimura for sharing this project with us and his help in compiling this post.

For more information visit www.sskkmr.com.

Images © SSK. Photos © Masaharu Okuda.

Published 23rd December 2020