Kimono Inspired Architecture

The client is a traditional craftsman who puts the crest on Japanese traditional clothes. The merchant in the wholesale store brings a lot of Japanese clothes that require crest work. The craftsman goes up the staircase that has the wall with perforated cross line and puts the crest on the clothes. The client's daughter prepares the crest work.

Exterior

The workshop area and the living area are separated but also connected. The client and his daughter need to have their work and home under the same roof. The crest making is a delicate work and also a business. It is quiet but busy. The drifting cloud is seen, and they finish working, and relax in the living room at the middle space. The reflected light becomes an infinite line of light and extends into the darkness of twilight on both sides of the living room. And the dark becomes deeper.

Two street side walls overlap on "Mise (show/shop)" space from right and left as like the chest of a Kimono. The "chest" interior becomes the shop space. The circular holes made for a cross shape becomes a pattern that decorates the wall as a crest. Any complicated crest pattern is formed from a circle.

Detail

Location: Kyoko, Japan
Client: Morita MON factory
Site area: 236.90m2
Total floor area: 259.78m2
Design team: EASTERN design office + HOJO STRUCTURE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

1F 2F Plan

Construction

The holes on the walls are lined up on a cross shape. They are structured like a perforated line. This is why the architecture’s name is "House with Crest". A light that penetrates into the architecture is always moving and never staying too long. It is a symbolical spectacle: a light goes through the hole is projected in a circle shape, moves unlimitedly, and never stays. Occasionally, it disappears and appears again.

EASTERN design office "lifts the one-storied house to the sky" to create a calm interior space. It is lifted 3m in the sky and the space under is lent as a parking lot. The one-storied house lifted to the sky makes "two outside spaces placed among three inside spaces". The wind and the light of nature gather from the sky into two outside void spaces. And that extends to three interior spaces.

Elevation Section
Du Mon
Crest_Heian-Mon-Kan
Morita MON factory
Interior
Du Mon Interior
View
MON factory
Morita

Photographer: Kouichi Torimura

Continue reading here: Slits Replacing Windows

Was this article helpful?

0 0