Project

Machine House

Year

2016

Course

Theory of Architectural Design II

Professors

Taishin Shiozaki, Stewart David-Butler

Location

Tateshina, Japan

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Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) studied at Tokyo Institute of Technology, graduated in 1953 and established his own practice in 1954. He’s been awarded the Architectural Institute of Japan’s grand prize (2005) and the commemorative Golden Lion by Biennale di Venezia (2010). Shinohara’s career was mostly devoted to designing houses. His architectural reflections naturally evolve around the idea of domesticity. His work is generally classified as having strong qualities of lucidity and ephemerality. Although his works are categorized into four styles by himself, throughout there is a consistent endeavor to set emotion at the center of space by means of reconciling two opposite poles. These poles may be best expressed by a set of overlapping dualities: urban/domestic, sacred/profane, formal/informal, order/chaos. Shinohara sees a necessity to provide spaces in which humans can detach themselves from the vertigo of modern life. Despite his focus on domesticity he also wrote some texts about urban conditions at the beginning and end of his career. The house and its antithesis, the city is another basic issue in his designs.

Shinoharas last work, the house in Tateshina, was planned as a summer residence for his daughter. The studio’s topic is a new proposal of a small building for the same site and function, by extracting and developing Shinohara’s concepts. My design questions one of his main concepts, the “machine”: a form of existence that humans create between themselves and nature in order to mediate and enhance it. Objects different from human beings and buildings but that often interfere with human activities and sometimes generate a kind of ambiguity in shape. Like a machine every space is a product of an assemblage of different elements in an apparent casual way of composition.