House with a trapezoidal garage House withThe garage that caught our attention may seem uninhabitable to Europeans or even Americans, but it is quite in the spirit of Japanese architects. They have already surprised us with apartments that look more like spacious coffins and tiny dwellings built on plots the size of a standard parking space. So, it is time to go to the city of Hyogo, where designers Hiroshi and Tomoko Sekiguchi have designed and built a very small house with black cladding and slanted walls, thus offering their own way of squeezing the maximum benefit from an almost insignificant piece of land.
It is interesting that the whole design, in the words of thearchitects, was based on the requirement to provide parking space for a large four-wheel drive vehicle. Accordingly, the compact garage forms a basement level, above which is the upper floor, which can be reached using an external staircase. Here is what the authors of the project say: "In order to create conditions for safe parking of the clients' car, we developed a plan that assumed the most efficient use of a plot of only 27 m2 by erecting walls as close as possible to the neighboring houses. The trapezoidal shape of the object is intended to soften the oppressive impression that could arise in the observer at the sight of such dense development."
Customers also wanted to be able tofully relax in your home and be protected from prying eyes. For this reason, the walls of the building have a minimum of openings, and daylight enters the premises through ceiling windows. In fact, dormer windows are the main ones of the few in the house.
Plywood cladding fills the interior with a sense ofwarmth and comfort, and the slight slope of the side walls towards the central axis of the building encourages you to look up and makes the space more open and elevated. From the outside, the house seems like an impregnable mountain, and from the inside, on the contrary, it is a bright refuge in which a person becomes closer to the sky.
Ultra-compact homes designedAmerican architects often look cloyingly sweet, but in Japan they are built as an expression of a conscious response to objective circumstances, as an expression of a creative approach to making the most efficient use of available space. We can learn a lot from the citizens of this country if we remember the paramount importance of safety and take into account our national context. Do you agree?
House with a garage as a model of ultra-compact architecture
