Article source: Yoshihiro Yamamoto Architects Atelier Co.,Ltd.

This house is designed for a couple and their little son. The site is a gentle hillside in the south of Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. The external shape is a simple square of 8.1 m × 8.1 m, but it has a complicated internal structure. We designed four small houses that extended from each vertex of a large house. The breakdown of four small houses is garage and bathroom, two bedrooms, Japanese style room and closet, and balcony. Because they all have different volumes, the gap between houses becomes a distorted crossroad like an alley. Residents can move in and out small houses and crossroads. It is a scenery like in a village. We designed the exterior as a simple residential icon, but it is wearing traditional cedar boards. We designed the interior as a complex village, but it is expressed as minimal white cubes. In the suburbs of Japan developed by urban planning in the 1970s including Sakai City, residential areas installed next to traditional villages. The boundary between the two communities has becoming ambiguous for 50 years. We thought that it was the most suitable architecture for this site to coexist some contradictory conditions.

Image Courtesy © Yohei Sasakura

• Architects: Yoshihiro Yamamoto Architects Atelier Co.,Ltd.
• Project: Crossroad House
• Location: Sakai, Japan
• Photography: Yohei Sasakura
• Structural Design: Ippei Yasue / Workshop Co.
• Construction: Masaki construction company
• Exterior Design: Takeo Matsushita / soji

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