“…where relevance is irrelevant,”

House in Hiyoshi’ by EANA, Kanagawa, Japan
image © koichi torimura
all images courtesy of EANA

I always look longingly at projects like this one in Kanagawa, Japan.  What could be more relevant for today’s life styles than a Modernist Box squeezed onto a tiny infill lot, positioned to take advantage of hillside views, and exactly the right size for commuting residents of first ring suburbs in metropolitan areas.  Unfortunately, getting a project like this past US building and zoning departments, where relevance is irrelevant, is usually a major challenge.  There are many architects that can do it, though.  One only needs to ask?

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The Gold Standard!

Few would disagree that a single family home is still, in most of the world,  the gold standard for a family lifestyle, followed closely and conditioned by location, which trumps the ideal to the extent that even the most irregular site is made to work architecturally.  Here is where an architect performs his/her magic.  It would be great fun to see the interior of this little gold (pun intended) house which has, not only been carefully contoured to its pie shaped site, but also designed so that the low gable and shed roofs reinforce the silhouette of its hillside location.

“Welcome to my garage.”

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Why hire an architect when it is so easy to just copy their ideas.   Somewhere around 1950 some pseudo modernist decide that if Frank Lloyd Wright could attach a garage to a house, then it  must be a good idea.  Just think of the convenience!  Straight from the car to the house with the groceries and all that.  Pretty soon very “un-Frank Lloyd Wright” city planners figured it into their formula for lot coverage.  So if the garage was actually detached and located in the back yard, there was only enough net area left over to build a very tiny, usually 2 story house because the long driveway was included in the lot coverage calculation.  Although recently new construction has moved away from this practice, the damage is already done.  We see entire neighborhoods of “welcome to my garage.”