House in Nagasaki

Klaus-Peter Gast

Description

An unusual group of buildings has come together on the rounded top of a wooded hill near the city of Nagasaki: two grey towers with a concrete base and glazed floor in between and a long hall structure, tapering and rising to a point a the ridge. Laboratories? An observatory? Hiroshi Hara consistently avoids the ‘family home’ typology cliché: identification is not easy. The game implemented in the two tower structures of an almost hermetically sealed ‘head’ with an entrance floor dissolved almost completely into glass below it does not immediately suggest a dwelling. And the almost random-looking position of this building with a planned third tower does not give much away about its use either. Hara places his buildings so that they detract from nature as little as possible.

The structures are isolated, thus emphasizing, and indeed celebrating, the topography and the profusion of trees, and emphatically presenting themselves as ‘individuals’, despite similarities of construction, form and material. The two towers together make up the actual home, but separately for parents and children. Their distance apart can be taken as evidence of two independently functioning buildings, but astonishingly enough the more southern of the two towers is just the ‘children’s sleeping house‘. Here access is provided on the glazed floor with entrance, terrace and toilet via the stairs to the upper floor, the bedroom area. The architect stages this sleeping zone as a hall, five metres high in the middle, the dimension of the room’s width and length. Sanitary facilities are in the parents‘ house opposite on the base floor, so that going through the wood for a shower becomes an integral part of the design. ’Living‘ takes place in the glazed entrance storey above this, with linear kitchen, stairs and four concrete piers as the fixed furniture.

A ’sleeping hall‘ ’floats‘ above the glass box in the parents’ house as well, topped by a shallow dome at a height of over six metres. A box is inserted for sanitary and cupboard facilities. Hara‘s radical departure from classical dwelling structure is particularly clear here: the bedroom area, sidelined somewhat by Western standards, is emphasized as a metaphysical cockpit, an independent and dominating ’dream house’. Finally, the ’study house‘ next to it is a slender hall structure, wedge-shaped in cross-section, intended for private exhibitions.