Description

Tadao Ando’s design for this little house in an old, heavily built-up district of Osaka, continues the idea he developed at an early stage, that of an individual world for its occupants to live in, with fixed boundaries and open courtyards. The two-storey walled square is a cramped parcel within a largely historical development of approximately consistent height. It is immediately adjacent to its neighbours and thus belongs to the terraced town house type. Its geometrically abstract character and the homogeneous, ascetic cast concrete of the walls form a contrast with the traditional gable-roofed wooden houses, without deviating from their sense of scale.

Ando feels that a private, rich ‘universe’ should develop in even the smallest of spaces. And so the key idea is not the optimization of functions but spatial complexity and creating spaces whose special linking and relationships between inside and outside determine the design, paired with extreme formal discipline. Ando’s invention of an ‘outside on the inside’ creates a sense of generous space–even with the relatively small dimensions available here–and an excitingly varied spatial sequence from open to closed, narrow to wide, horizontal to vertical. The ‘richness’ of these links determines the ground plan disposition: the bedrooms on the ground floor have courtyards in front of them and the kitchen-living room on the top floor opens on to the terrace and courtyard. The fact that the back bedroom on the ground floor is primarily reached by going up and then down two stairs is part of the architect’s programmatic approach: the way through the levels of the house become an adventure. As in Tadao Ando’s epoch-making Azuma House, 1975, in Osaka, the access paths lead through the open courtyards which are exposed to the elements, linking architecture with nature and the family world with the urban world. The physical and tactile experience of natural events (wind, rain) becomes the way the space is staged and orchestrated. A tree accent in the rear courtyard is an artificially created nature signal.

The Nomi House continues the questioning of the classical ´family house´ cliché that started with the Azuma House. It is thus an important example of one of the architect´s concepts that has matured over the years, and of contemporary Japanese inner-city living in a confined space.

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Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.