Performing Arts / Park-Yard

The preparation process of the drama is usually hidden inside a closed small theater, which is only opened during performances. In the Covid-19 situation, a very small amount of performance makes the actor’s life difficult to sustain.
Taking this as an opportunity, we hope to release parts of the functions of the preparation process into the park and the open ground floor space as a workshop, with the intention of opening and displaying the process of drama preparation and sharing skills in cooperation with surrounding residents.

Hersey House

Reading Hersey House-an unbuilt project by Robert Venturi for a beach house with no particular plot-we be came fascinated by the way this small house pretends to be bigger with its thin extended roof, hiding its smallness behind a projecting porch with a big cutout circle. In our project inspired by Hersey House, we aimed to keep and reinterpret the thin roof, making it almost as big as possible, but shifting it from its central position, in order to create different spaces underneath.
We kept the clearly defined orientation of the house, designing its entrance on the opposite side to the general approach, in a way similar to Hersey House.
Looking at the plan, all rooms are set to one side, leaving room for one big open space, but unlike in Hersey house, we decided to continue this openness into the second floor, creating a loft-like space.
We reinterpreted the porch or second skin, as we like to call it, by a wooden mesh-like construction with a cantilever behind, in order to create a parking space necessary in Tokyo’s urban context and also in order to provide a somewhat playful reference to House in Uehara house by Kazuo Shinohara, situated just a few doors away.
Lastly, we decided to keep the stilts of Hersey House and adjust them to our sloping terrain, because we thought of them as characteristic of Hersey’s image. Moreover, put ting the house up on legs gives a certain hint about its origin, suggesting that it came from somewhere else.

D’Agostino House

This is a house with two entrances and a shortcut, situated between an iconic townhouse and a parking lot. Related solely to its neighbor and to Venturi’s large, unrealized D’Agostino House, we opened for a linear tripartite sequence – front garden, living space, and utilities – in which one moves from automotive urbanity to the innermost sanctuary of the human dwelling.
The garden hides behind a façade that nods to its neighbor and whose mere existence is a Venturian feature. You park the car and advance diagonally to the subtle front entrance.
The living space is a large cubic space. Its direction changes abruptly and dramatically breaks up the linearity of the scheme. One glides upward via a broad stair, into the light that flows down from the large windows above.
From here, one moves either up to a second floor bed room or down to the kitchen, from which you may also jpg B escape via a backdoor.

Nippori / Station as Threshold

Nippori Station is where the Narita line transfers to the Yamanote line. It is the first station where foreign tourists arrive, a number that has increased recently. Many foreigners move to the transfer trains while dragging their suitcases. Yanaka Ginza is located to the west side of the station. It is a popular sightseeing spot where old-fashioned townscapes are surprisingly well-preserved as they escaped war damage and the large scale development in the city center. Nippori station holds 14 train tracks. It consisted of 2 bridge outsite of ticket gate that connects west-east side of the station, and 3 bridges that connects several platform inside the ticket gates. The bridge that connects the east and west side of the city located in the north is a famous spot called the “Train Museum”, crowded with people who come to watch many kinds of trains pass on the track. In the future, where the ticket gate will be touchless and gateless, there will be nothing to separate these two bridges from each other. Exploring the use of local potential for the tourism in future, what would bridge of Nippori station will look like? The two types of bridges are connected so that people can come and go in between and a luggage service is set up on the Keisei line side. This will create an opportunity for the foreign tourists to use their spare time enjoyably while waiting for flights at Narita airport, or for the of hotel check-in, by being able to walk in Yanaka Ginza. A middle floor between the platform and the bridge is installed to develop a train museum. For the local people this intervention will become the base of spreading the culture of Yanaka Ginza to foreign countries. In the flow of local people and foreign visitors passing by each other, the fusion space of two kinds of bridges will be the meeting point where cultures form distant foreign countries meet each other. This is symbolized by the roof structure that alternately straddles the two bridges.