Japan
In Japan, the standard housing model have begun to fundamentally change. From traditional airy buildings with sliding doors in order to cope with the hot and humid climate, it becomes super airtight and highly insulated buildings with thick walls and triple-glazed plastic sash windows in correspondance with grobal climate crisis. Rather than following the look and materials of conventional buildings, we have redesigned what an essential home should be.
By focusing on the “window,” the only moving part of the building that connects the resident to the city, and by giving form to the various behaviors that occur around the window, we have achieved a psychological “opening” of the closed structure with thick walls. By allowing the windows to play a leading role in the design, the architectural elements that create the streetscape and the behavior of the residents are integrated, making it possible to build a new relationship between people and the city in a highly airtight, highly insulated model house.
It is an attempt to reconstruct the tradional Japanese veranda(EN-GAWA) space in the comtemporary age.