FOBA/Katsu Umebavashi
Aura House In Tokyo, Japan Photographs:Tohru Waki (Shokokusha Pub. Co., Ltd.)
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| Design Aura House |
Architect : Katsu Umebavashi .
Site Project : Tokyo, Japan .
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| Design Aura House In Tokyo, Japan |
In the amorphous complexity of central Tokyo, urban structure occurs at scales imperceptible to the pedestrian observer. Forms are either incoherent or irrelevant; the urban experience is a succession of interior spaces. Here, a house requires few facilities. To eat. you go to a restaurant; to bathe. you go to the sento (public baths); to exercise. you go to the gym; to be entertained. you go to the cinema. The ultimate Tokyo house is somehow like an art gallery: an empty, inward-looking space, perhaps with unusual lighting. The Aura house is located in a typical Japanese "eel's nest' site: an alley 3.5 meters wide by 21.5 meters long. The challenge was to bring light and air into the center of the house. Rather than using the traditional tsubo-nma (courtyard garden), the architects opted instead for optimizing both the avail-able light and the potential floor area. Concrete walls were run down either side of the site and a translucent mem-brane was stretched between them. In order to sustain tension in the roof fabric, a complex curve was created by making the two walls identical but reversed. Cylindrical concrete beams brace the two walls. The opposing ridge lines cause the orientation of the beams to twist along the length of the build-ing - despite appearances, a rational structural solution. The fabric skin filters sunlight by day. and glows by night: the building pulses, "breathing" light with the 24-hour rhythm of the city.
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| longitudinal section |
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| Side Elevation |
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| ground floor plan |
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| Second floor plan |
