Selected Project
M2-house
A residence organised around light and a courtyard
Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan 2019
Project
Architecture in context
- Location
- Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan
- Year
- 2019
- Type
- Residence
M2-house — Constructing a Virtual Horizon
The site is located within a residential district in the urban area of Matsumoto. When perceived from ground level, it appears as an ordinary urban landscape enclosed by surrounding houses. Yet even a slight elevation of the viewpoint substantially transforms this perception. A continuous field of trees emerges beyond the rooftops, revealing that the site is, in fact, situated within a richly vegetated environment.
Most of the surrounding houses organize their living spaces as direct extensions of the existing ground plane. In contrast, this project proposes the deliberate elevation of the inhabited floor. This operation is not intended merely to establish distance from the street or neighbouring properties. Rather, by temporarily severing the immediate relationship between domestic space and the adjacent ground, the design redirects the gaze towards more distant conditions and reconnects the dwelling with the vegetation, sky, and urban topography extending beyond the boundaries of the site.
By elevating not only the interior living spaces but also a substantial semi-outdoor living area, the building produces another ground plane above the existing terrain. Although physically detached from the earth, this elevated surface becomes a new foundation for everyday life, capable of receiving light, wind, and the presence of surrounding trees. The floor is therefore conceived not simply as an architectural element, but as an artificially constructed, virtual ground level.
Through its separation from the earth, the building paradoxically establishes a more profound relationship with the landscape latent within the site. M2-house is an architecture that seeks to discover environmental qualities that remain largely imperceptible from ground level and to draw them into the sphere of everyday life.
The same neighbourhood is also home to *2004*, a house designed by Hideyuki Nakayama. Although this relationship was recognized only retrospectively, M2-house may be understood as pursuing an approach that is, in certain respects, the inverse of that embodied in *2004*. Rather than approaching the surface of the earth and discovering spatial potential within its continuity, this project elevates the floor and introduces a deliberate distance from the ground in order to establish a new relationship with the surrounding environment.
This difference, however, should not be interpreted as an opposition. The two projects may instead be understood as distinct responses to a shared architectural question: how the relationship between architecture and the ground might be reconsidered within the same locality. By distancing itself from the earth—more markedly than *2004*—M2-house attempts to reveal another landscape concealed within the deeper spatial structure of the place.