House O was designed by Jun Igarashi Architects back in 2009 to face the living needs of a young people for privacy and ease of circulation. Therefore the house, located outside a small village in the Hokkaido Prefecture ( Tokio ), develops entirely in one floor. Also, it was the peculiar context of the project and its distance from the neighbours that directly shaped its plan: in fact, the original idea of a rational square plan was rejected when the architects realized how the interior space would be strangely oriented and how it'd relate with the outdoors.
A new approach was applied and each room was cut out to be placed in a location and orientation that was favourable. As the extra corridors and new set of ideas take place, the traditional hierarchy of the plan is lost and replaced with a volumetric one: the tallest element is the living room and all the other spaces reduce their height according to their function. I find extremely intriguing the process that lead the architects to abandon a rational, modernist approach and embrace a totally context-driven thought, where each room gets to express its essence and relate with the outdoors almost in a "personal way".
Photohraphy | Iwan Baan
Via Archdaily
