House in Black

Klaus-Peter Gast

Description

Chiba Manabu’s black house for a female pianist appeals because of its simple basic figure with sculptural aspirations. The cubic body gains its tension from two notches in the entrance area and on the top floor. But Manabu specializes in unusually linked spaces, created by the use of light shafts and air spaces that dissolve the conventional horizontal quality of the levels. The floors are perforated over often minute areas, to make it possible to look through and create vertical spatial connections. This results in a spatial structure providing daylight throughout the layered functional areas and makes vertically oriented living possible. Opening up the levels – despite the relatively small apertures – dissolves the rigid separation of the storeys and a subtle yet dramatic spatial composition emerges: areas that are clearly intelligible in spatial terms penetrate each other horizontally and vertically within a strictly right-angled system.

On the ground floor, the three-storey building contains the access area with stairs and separate entrance, the piano room and a study. The living area is on the first floor, with the open staircase rising through it; then the kitchen, the children’s room and a ‘Japanese room’ are attached to the living area. With the exception of the children‘s room, all the rooms have light apertures running up to the roof, in the living room on both sides and across the full width. So the bedroom above seems as if suspended, as the living space intervenes at the topmost level on both narrow sides, thus developing enormous transparency. The daylight dominates all rooms, without it being possible to look in directly from the neighbouring houses. The terrace incision on the second floor separates the bedroom from the bathroom, and allows the occupants to spend time in the open air undisturbed. Manabu deploys simple resources to produce a complex world of living in restricted space, but permitting a generous opening up to the intended privacy.