UT-house

Project

Architecture in context

Location

Nagano, Japan

Year

2021

Type

Residence

The site is situated midway up a gently elevated hillside overlooking Zenkō-ji Temple. The land slopes downward to the east, offering an exceptional vantage point from which the centre of Nagano can be surveyed from above. Engaging with this landscape is both an obvious precondition of the project and a natural architectural response. Yet the questions of how, to what extent, and in what form this environment should be incorporated open onto an almost limitless field of possibilities. What is proposed here represents only one possible response; at the same time, it embodies the entirety of my architectural position.
A low, horizontal volume is placed upon a wall that cuts through the site in a broad curve. Expressed in words, the architecture consists of little more than this. Beyond that initial proposition begins the struggle of construction: a confrontation with material, structure, and the physical substances through which architecture may come into being. At its most abstract level, however, the building can be described precisely in those terms and no more.
In the contemporary world, digitalization has generated innovation across nearly every field. Yet just as the human body cannot be fully dematerialized into electronic form, architecture cannot escape its existence as a physical object. This is evidence of architecture’s status as an artefact and, equally, of the fact that an artefact cannot convincingly disguise itself as nature. For this reason, the flat, emphatically horizontal volume may also be understood as profoundly human: it is an object that resists the surrounding landscape and gives physical form to the human will.
Only later did I realize that the image of a continuous curved wall penetrating the building had been carried forward from a competition proposal I developed twenty years earlier. Whether or not that idea is ultimately realized, and in what form it might take, may be less important to me than recognizing the continuity of thought itself.

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