LAB #6(45) 2008

TOMASA UEDA + NAVA-KEN JIMU _ A SINCERE STORY OF A KANAGAWA DWELLER | Photos by Hiroyuki Hirai | Text by Anna Lengle | Project NOVELA is a little story from everyday life of dis- tricts of Kanagawa about the personal perception of space that defined the appearance of the original architectural shape. The house brought into reality the customers’ dream of having their own quiet corner and also satisfied their desire to impress the people around. The place in a busy district that was given the architects to design the project is a square without any peculiarities, without particularly nice or ugly ele- ments, not big, not small with «nothing in particular» as the most relevant characteristic. And, indeed, nothing in particular determines this site. Because of deficit of free space around, the new building had to take the shape of a cube and submissively wedded with the corresponding area. Palladio or Le Corbusier could have been glad to see this form ap- pear, but for Tomasa Ueda who designed the house it would mean hopeless gutlessness and faceless- ness of the place that have already been that way before. The architects had no foundation for creation of a decent original project, so they decided to take this facelessness as a starting point. In this situation they had to choose the dynamics inside the house, developing it vertically. At some point, delivered by

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