Totally Awesome 'Penguin House'

You know I'm a huge fan of Japanese modernist houses. This one is genius.

'Penguin House' (aka Skin House Project #2) by Yasuhiro Yamashita of Atelier Tekuto.

Via the girl in the green dress

Bits 'n' Pieces

Just a couple of quick things:

The wonderful blog DO Research has closed shop - it is already missed. The upside is they've bought land and are building a Flatpak. I am wildly jealous!

Read the story behind the sea container Holyoke Cabin on the Hive Modular blog. So cool.

Skinny Japanese Houses on eye candy (via Things Magazine). Only in Japan [sigh].

The amazingly hip Alan Family Happy New House is complete. Check it out in The New York Times. It turned out just like the renderings - very, very cool. It shows you just how much you can do with a remodel.

I just picked up a good book, Small Eco-houses. Loaded with interesting, green, modern homes from all over the world. Two thumbs up!

image credit - Amazon.com listing

HOUSE kn by Kochi Architect's Studio

Another Japanese wonder, HOUSE kn by Kochi Architect's Studio. Beautiful [sigh]. The floor plan is very nice and the outdoor space is wonderful.


Nice treatment of parking space too. My pet peeve is nice homes ruined by ugly attached garages and bad driveways. HOUSE kn gets it right.

Via the girl in the green dress. It's a wonderful design blog, so please do click over and take a look. You'll be delighted.

Image credit - Kochi Architect's Studio site.

Akihisa Hirata Architecture Office's House t

I hate to say it, but I haven't spotted anything really interesting in a while that I wanted to post on. Yes, things have been going on. I check my feed readers every day, I see them. But I've sort of found it to be more of the same. Nothing really turned my head.

Finally, I saw something that sparked a little daydreaming again, which is really what I'm after. It's "House t" by Akihisa Hirata Architecture Office (HAO) of Tokyo, Japan. Of course, it's Japanese. Is there any place in the world that produces more unique, original, thought provoking houses than Japan? NO WAY!





The approach to a second story and the division of spaces in the home is totally different. I get lost just looking at the roof line and the placement of the windows. It's bright, clean and sculptural in a way that only Japanese houses are.

Via Things Magazine (October 3rd, 2007)

Image credits - HAO site

Tezuka Architects "House to Catch the Sunlight"

At the suggestion of Jeffrey Pena, who just finished an apprenticeship at Tezuka Architects in Japan, I took a look at the firm's "House to Catch the Sunlight." You can read Jeffrey's comments in this post. He made some great remarks about families staying connected in smaller, smarter homes. He held up this tiny, 282 square-foot marvel as a perfect example of a home that has only what you need, yet lacks nothing, and through great design lives large and well.








This house definitely has that signature Tezuka style - clean, casual, natural. The public spaces are upstairs, while the private spaces are on the lower floor. I love the very simple treatment of the bedroom - meditative. The built-in storage keeps objects out of sight and helps make the space feel larger than it is. The placement of windows for play of light is masterful.

Jeffrey closed his comment with "We need to think about making our homes not keep us captive." Well said. That strikes a chord with me. The reason I do this blog is because I really believe that what we live in affects how we live, and that most American homes don't enhance our living experience, and can actually be a burden to us. I'm a huge fan of Tezuka Architects for creating great homes that function beautifully, with an economy that results in purity of purpose. Truly, in Japanese spirit, the limitation becomes the strength. Brilliant.

Jeffrey, thanks for your comment, and for pointing out this wonderful home.

Image credit - Tezuka Architects site

Power Unit Studio's "Y-House" - Japanese Modern Marvel in Concrete

I saw the greatest house today on HGTV's show World's Most Extreme Homes. It was yet another amazingly cool Japanese home, this time by the firm Power Unit Studio. It's called the "Y-House" and it is an absolute wonder in concrete.




The house is cantilevered over a sloping suburban lot in Nagoya. Multiple levels flow down through the house, invoking the falling elevation of the site. The owners are both designers, and work from home. Their roomy office hangs out over the main living space and looks down on it via a large window. Typical of Japanese modern homes, there's a sleek and functional kitchen tucked behind one wall. Sleeping spaces are small and simply appointed. I don't think there is a 90 degree angle in the whole place. The roof and porch space look like something out of a skate park. This is one urban (suburban, really) infill project that clearly doesn't mind clashing with the neighborhood!






I think the pics here, from the Power Unit Studio site, just don't quite do the house justice. Maybe because as depicted here it isn't really being lived in yet. On World's Most Extreme Homes (episode HWEXT-410), with the owners there and their belongings in the house, it actually looks extremely warm and comfortable. You can also see a some more pics in a .pdf file here that show it a lot better (click the first link in the Google search results that come up).

I continue to be entranced by Japanese modernist houses. They're soooo different from American homes, and for whatever reason, to me they just look much more livable and comfortable. I really can't put my finger on why that is, but I'm enjoying digging around and finding more of them. I like the Y-House a lot.

Image credits - Power Unit Studio site

Living Large in the Compact 9tubohouse

It's so great when old ideas, once forgotten, are rediscovered and flourishing today. That's the case with the lovable Japanese 9tubohouse. Originally designed in in 1952 by Makoto Masuzawa as an "absolute minimum" house anyone could afford, the 9tubo has been revived of late by Makoto Koizumi and others, who are working to bring this compact darling to homeowners in Japan today.




The 9tubohouse is based on the traditional Japanese unit of measurement in building, the tubo. One tsubo is a square composed of two tatami mats arranged side by side. At nine tsubos (naturally) the plan is only 538 square feet inside. It's a small, but highly livable design, with its wall of windows, a compact but efficient kitchen, a tatami room, and a spacious loft. It's a very efficient design that lives a lot larger than its tiny footprint. The houses are easy to build too, utilizing simple and traditional post and beam construction.

I love the way the houses are finished. Very natural and modern. Here are pics of a few different 9tubohouses:




Most of the pics above are of the second 9tubohouse (the dark one - the first 9tubohouse is the very first pic at the top of the post). As you can see, there are lots of variations on the basic theme too - taller ones, wider ones, etc. - some of which I've shown. I really like the exterior treatment of the bottom one, and the matching detached studio.

Of course, the 9tubohouse site is all in Japanese, and so it's hard for me to navigate. But click around, there are lots of great images including many of people visiting 9tubohouses during an open house showing. There is an English page, but it is still being developed.

You can read about the 9tubohouse in the great book, Space: Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living. It's one of my very favorite books, and it gives the 9tubohouse generous treatment, with over twenty pages on it and tons of very good pictures. The 9tubohouse is on the cover, which is appropriate, as it perfectly embodies the concept of the book.




By the way, is it "tubo" or "tsubo." I always see it written tsubo, like in the book Space, but I'm going with tubo since that is how the web address is written.

The Japanese concept of turning limitations into strengths is really at work here. The 9tubohouse works well, even for families, despite its tiny size. Everything you need is there, and nothing is wasted. Though small, it is bright and airy and never feels cramped. And it has so much personality, which is what every house should have. Beautiful!

Image credits - 9tubohouse site, Amazon.com listing

Tezuka Architects Roof House

I've fallen in love with the simple, uniquely clever style of homes by Japan's Tezuka Architects. The tiny Engawa House is in my top five all time favorites. Here's another great one: the Roof House.

Every family has some unique requirement for their home. The family that commissioned the Roof House liked to sit out on their roof and eat lunch. That's what they wanted, literally, a house with a big roof deck. And why not? The site of their new home is on a beautiful hillside overlooking a small, pleasant valley. If you have a view like that why waste it?




The Tezukas delivered a home with a gently sloping roof that parallels the terrain of the site. The space is fully equipped for family living. It has an outdoor kitchen and dining table, a stove, and believe it or not, a shower. From the pictures I've seen it is not enclosed or sheltered from the neighbors' windows. Now, I know Japanese sensibilities are a little different from Americans', but I think I'd take my shower in the inside bath. Nevertheless, I love it when a home challenges convention, and this one surely does. And issues of culture and modesty aside, I'm sure anyone can enjoy lunch in the sunshine, taking in the panorama below. There's a small wall section to help shelter diners from the prevailing breezes. It looks extremely pleasant up there.




Now, I have small children, and I'm not sure I'd be totally comfortable with them playing on an open roof with no kind of rail. But again I'm inclined to ignore that in favor of appreciating the creativity of the space.

Inside there are skylights everywhere - eight of them - and lots of ladders to take you up to the roof (there's even one in the inside bathroom). Thought the family prefers lounging on the roof the inside space is great too. In typical Japanese fashion it has a small but effective kitchen, a nice open living space (minimally furnished), a small bedroom for parents and another for children, a small office, and a single bath. Simple sliding doors divide the rooms where necessary.




It looks like a really comfortable and livable family home. Very open and bright. Very relaxed.

Visit the Tezuka site for more photos of the house, or pick up the book Small Houses- Edition 2007 by Carles Broto. The book features both the Roof House and the Engawa House, as well as many other fine examples of compact homes.

Image credits - Tezuka Architects site

Take a Look at Shigeru Ban's Furniture House 1

I know I've gone on and on in this blog about Shigeru Ban's Naked House. It continues to just amaze me the way Ban deconstructed the typical family home and recreated it in this elegant , glowing, minimalist form. So cool.

Today Inhabitat had a nice piece on Ban's Curtain Wall House - another highly unconventional and beautiful home. It reminded me to visit his site again and take a look at other houses he's done. You know, he has done just a ton of cool houses. The one I like the best (other than the Naked House, my all time favorite) is the modest and simple Furniture House 1. It has a marvelously clean and peaceful look, but without pretense or formality. That's hard to do with minimalist modern homes. Too often they come off as cold and museum like. Ban shows the same touch here that he does in the Naked House - just perfect.




Furniture House One employs a kind of unique prefab, structural wall/furnishing strategy that's worth a look. Here's a description of the house and system from Shigeru Ban's site:

"The construction system for the Furniture House features factory produced full-height units that function as structural elements as well as space-defining elements. Since these units are pre-fabricated, construction time on-site is greatly reduced and cost-effective. Serving both as the furniture and as the building material, these units enable a reduction of equipment and labor, as well. (The dimensions of the units used in this house are 2.4 meters high, 0.9 meters wide, with an 0.45 meters depth for bookcases and a 690mm depth for other units.) An individual unit, weighing about 79.2kg, can be easily handled by a single person, and its self-supporting function makes the arrangement simple."

This same system was used in the construction of several subsequent versions of the home. In one interesting variation (below) built in China, Ban used laminated bamboo for pretty much the entire home, from structure to interior and exterior finishes. It's just another example of the master at work, exploring and innovating. Pretty impressive.



Image Credits - Shigeru Ban site

Tezuka Architects' Engawa House in Latest Issue of Dwell

The latest issue of Dwell finally showed up in my mailbox yesterday. It was two weeks late compared to normal, and to be honest, I was starting to freak out a little bit. But my patience was rewarded! It's a good issue that focuses on spectacular small homes. And in particular, it features yet another splendid Japanese modern home, the Engawa House in Tokyo by Tezuka Architects. Oh joy!




I must say, I love this house. I really do. At only 802 square feet, the Engawa House lives very large. Its long sliding glass wall along one entire side draws little or no distinction between the home's interior and its pleasant little garden. The clean, uncluttered design of compact and efficient spaces helps the house feel a lot bigger than it is.

And the floor plan is just great. It's a little unconventional by western standards, but it looks exceptionally livable to me. And I have an idea. I think this simple rectangular box, with this floorplan, could be the basis of a great prefab, expandable/modular home system. You start with the main 800 sq-ft house, prefab and delivered to your site. It's designed in such a way that additional modules can be added to each end to enlarge the space slightly over time as family needs change or as money allows. As your family grows a little you add on a second prefab module - a 16x16 square living room that tacks on the kitchen end. A third module can be added to the other end to give you a master bedroom with its own efficient bath. Basically, the original 800 sq-ft house gets expanded by another five hundred or so square feet - still modest in size but a little larger overall.

Wouldn't it be great to build a house this way - a little at a time, prefab, so you can buy what you need when you need it, and save the money for each module ahead of time instead of having to take out a bigger and bigger mortgage (instead of paying interest , which drives up lifetime cost, you make interest on your savings, and reduce the time to ownership and avoid debt). Why don't we see more solutions like that coming? I hope that the recent boom in modern prefab will bring us some interesting new options.

The Tezuka Architects site shows a lot of their houses (and their other projects). I dig their work. They've done some really cool houses. The two pics below are of another one I like a lot, the Observatory Room House. More great stuff from Japan. Very inspiring.




Image Credits - Tezuka Architects site

Something to Watch For - Muji's Japanese Modern Prefab in America

I've been gone again - but this time on vacation! While I was away Preston at JetsonGreen had an interesting post about the prefab house by Muji of Japan (often called the "Japanese IKEA"). Apparently Muji is finally coming to America, and possibly bringing it's prefab housing with it! If you have been a reader of Future House Now you know that I am infatuated with Japanese modern homes, and this nifty design from Muji is great. Maybe if it comes to the USA I can build one! Here's a link the the general Muji site and another link to the site for the Muji houses. Of course, everything is in Japanese. Actually, it isn't that hard to navigate once you see what is what - just click around a bit.




Whether or not a Muji house is ever brought to America, we can all appreciate the clean, simple aesthetics of Japanese modern homes, and their approach to living well in smaller spaces. When I think about the home I want to build for my family, I often look to Japanese houses like this one for inspiration.

Here's a few more pics:







Image Credits: Muji site

Japanese House Blog Houseco.jp

I really need to learn Japanese, if only so I can read this nifty Japanese blog I just came across. It's called Houseco, and the title is about the only thing in English. I had a little trouble navigating the site due to the language barrier, but I didn't have to make more than two or three random clicks to become completely smitten with it. Houseco is flush with great pics of modern Japanese dwellings. I think I could just surf this blog for hours looking at the many interesting houses it highlights. Here's a couple of examples, including what appears to be (maybe?) a pretty nice looking IBU home, which proves that great ideas are the real universal human language.




















Image credits - Houseco.jp

NAYA Architects

As you know, I'm presently fascinated with modern Japanese houses. I just came across the website for another interesting Japanese firm, NAYA Architects. Their page on new homes they've designed features over 35 examples of their work. Each house has its own page loaded with pics. Their houses are very clean, bright, and minimal. They have a sculptural quality that you don't see in America's suburbs. I particularly like their House in Shinyokohama. Of course, the site is pretty much entirely in Japanese, which means I can't read it. But I can look. Here's a few examples for you to enjoy.























Image Credits: NAYA Architects site

More Interesting Japanese Homes from ADH Architects

I continue to be infatuated with modern Japanese dwellings. I like the aesthetic, to be sure, but I'm also impressed with the way they challenge convention, particularly compared to typical Western notions of what a family home should be.

I just came across the work of the Tokyo based firm ADH Architects, whose two principles are Makoto Shin Watanabe and Yoko Kinoshita Watanabe. Two of their houses are featured in the book Space: Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living by Michael Freeman (Universe Publishing, 2004, USA). In Space, Freeman says the architects "have a particular interest in designing to meet individual family needs, devising structural solutions that will help engineer a particular lifestyle." In the two houses shown, a maximum emphasis is placed on creating close family interactions. Communal areas are larger while private areas are restricted in size.

In the NT House (left two images, below) the bedrooms are small, and the entire family shares one combined room/closet/laundry space for all storage. In the TO House (right two images) the whole family - parents and two small sons - share a single common sleeping space and the children's play room has direct access from the kitchen - the busy hub of the house's main floor.













Not only do these homes look amazing, we can learn a lot from them about what we really need in our family homes - public spaces vs. private, number and size of bedrooms, arrangement of rooms to each other, purpose of rooms, approach to storage and utility spaces, etc. Is a 2500 sq-ft, 3 BR, 2 1/2 Bath, luxury master suite, home office arrangement what we really need? Is that what suits our lives best? Or if we challenge ourselves a little to open our minds can we live better in something a little different? I think so.

Image credits - book cover from Amazon.com listing, homes from ADH site.

The Moriyama House by Ryue Nishizawa

Here's another Japanese home that sheds traditional notions of what a house "should be" and in so doing realizes a unique and functional place for living. This is the Moriyama House by Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa. This interesting collection of prefab boxes is home to both the owner and several rental tenants, who share a mix of public and private spaces in this self-made community. You can read about it in the Dec/Jan '07 issue of Dwell - the house was the cover story. You can also see the complete floorplans for all three levels of the structures, as well as several 360 degree views via QuickTime video, at The Japan Architect.


The spare simplicity of the structures satisfies my own minimalist streak very nicely. My Mom once said, when my wife mentioned we wanted a modern home, "You want to live in a white box???" Well, if it's something like these in the Moriyama House compund, then yes.

This house (or these houses, really) isn't for everybody. But it works for the people who live there. And that's what a house is supposed to do, isn't it. Does yours?

Image Credit - Dwell site

Shigeru Ban's Naked House

I think what makes it so hard for us when buying or building a home are all the paradigms we live with about what a home should be. The people that inspire me the most are those that have dropped their preconceived notions and built a house for the way they really live. A case in point is noted Japanese architect Shigeru Ban's Naked House.



The Naked House is a long translucent box built for a family on a tight budget. Construction techniques were unusual - translucent corrugated plastics outside, nylon sheets inside, and foamed polyethylene stuffed bags sandwiched in between. Inside Ban used imaginative movable structures that evoke small rooms in traditional Japanese homes, complete with tatami mats. The boxes can be rolled to different places in the house depending on what the family needs at any given time. The Naked House offers a cost effective, beautiful, and flexible solution for living. It does so by challenging almost every notion of what a family house should be. Everything a family needs in a home is there, yet the approach is entirely unique.




One thing that continues to draw me back to the house is its translucent exterior. The house glows with soft light, inside and out, day and night. I love translucent materials in homes. Translucent polycarbonate is one of my favorite building materials. There are so many things you can do with it. I'll try to have a post soon with some examples of what I mean.




Ban's Naked House is simply wonderful! I just love it. You can read more about Shigeru Ban in this article by ArchitectureWeek. You can also read about The Naked House in the book The Green House, which I reviewed in an earlier post.

Image Credits - Shigeru Ban site

Interesting Houses by Japanese Firm Loco Architects

I was surfing around and found this great site on earth building - Earth Architecture. They have a post on the Japanese firm Loco Architects and their rammed earth concept house (pic, left).

I visited the Loco Architects site. Unfortunately, it's in Japanese and I can't read it. But if you click around there are some pics of really neat homes they've done. Here are some examples of their work:























I really like the sculptural, minimalist qualities of Japanese modern homes. I have some other favorites by other Japanese architects that I'll post something on later. The Japanese always have something inspiring - often very unique in the approach to a home, and usually very efficient in both maximum use of small space and consumption of energy.

Image Credits: Loco Architects site