Sway House (The Japanese theorem 2)

project Atelier Bow Wow
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Momoyo Kaijima, Takahiko Kurabayashi

...it was time to transforming a severe limitation into precious quality...

Sway House goes beyond its own twisted profile to propose an alternative to the biggest residential quarter in Tokyo, Setagaya, an urban fabric dense with discordant residential objects, accumulated in the layering of the last century. Atelier Bow Wow is not just an architecture studio, but a laboratory of architectural analysis, and the two chief architects, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, both in their early forties, are undoubtedly the best guides to theoretical and practical architecture in Japan. They create spatial domains where the desires of clients come true in dwellings whose design is directly based on the character of the place. Individual lifestyles and urban consistency finally meet in private spaces that have the soul of urban objects. Analysis of this site led to the identification of three different habitation generations. Within the constraints of the Sky Coverage Ratio, the building regulation that determines the profiles of structures to limit their shadow zones, it was time to make the first fourth generation structure, responding to the desires of the clients, a young couple, while transforming a severe limitation into precious quality. Sway House is a parallelepiped with a wooden framework clad in horizontal panels of galvanized steel. On a corner lot of 78 m2, it twists like a tango dancer, retracting a single upper peak. The inclined interior space eludes perspective canons and is divided into nine rooms on four staggered levels, for a total height of 10 meters. Each slab is a gigantic step whose volume communicates with its neighbors, multiplying the perception of the overall 107 m2 of floorspace. The white spiral staircase is the spine of the entire composition and connects all the spaces, from the entrance level, the bedroom and the husband’s studio on the first floor, to the living area and kitchen on the second, rising toward the open studio of the wife and the children’s room on the third level, and then landing, on the terrace, between an outdoor bathtub and the rooftops of Tokyo. With the exception of the first level, Sway House has no internal dividers, and the alternation of staggered horizontal levels generates oblique perspectives, as well as openings of different sizes, rising on inclined planes, to offer irregular quadrilateral frames for the view of the city. The interiors are clear and functional, with wooden floors. The suspended ceiling becomes a bookcase, the bench is also a sofa, concealing a belly full of objects. Is this the Japanese house of the near future?