Huge steel beams with I-shaped profiles were stacked to form the framework of this Tokyo property by Mount Fuji Architects Studio, which features a red spiral staircase winding amongst its floors .
Neighborhood firm Mount Fuji Architects Studio – whose past projects incorporate a property centred all around a tree-like column – developed Log Rhythm property as a house for a couple, in a modern residential improvement on the outskirts of the Japanese capital.
The style of the 3-storey building is informed by the traditional methods of constructing azekura log cabins – an ancient developing typology featuring walls made from lengths of rounded timber that intersect at the corners.
The architects reinterpreted this technique to suit the property’s contemporary urban context by swapping the layered logs for industrial steel I-beams – also acknowledged as H-beams or universal beams.
The beams have a huge section of 700 millimetres by 350 millimetres and are far more generally used in significant development tasks.
Here, they are stacked to form a monumental construction that is accentuated by the exposed profiles at the building’s corners.
An alternating arrangement creates gaps among the best and bottom edges of the beams for bands of windows, which are frosted in locations where privacy is necessary.
Internally, their joints are smoothed off to soften the material’s industrial quality.
“H-steel’s material properties, such as enormous excess weight and strength, mathematical regularity and gentleness expressed in rounded corners have been assembled into a log-residence form and intensified in an attempt to furnish a desirable locality to a featureless, newly-produced residential location,” stated architect Masahiro Harada.
The stacked beams are left exposed internally to evoke standard Japanese shinkabe wood-framed building, which does not conceal the frame behind plasterwork and rather uses plaster to fill in spaces close to the construction.
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“My curiosity lies in the shinkabe (plastered walls with exposed timber pillars) rather than the okabe (walls where pillars are plastered over),” said Harada. “[Shinkabe] adds to the living atmosphere the locality that nicely-constructed materials things radiate, by exposing the architectural framework on its surface.”
Inside the residing locations, the visible framework enhances the building’s materiality and simple building, with the beams forming integrated shelving and benches about the edges of the rooms.
The ground floor accommodates a bedroom with constructed-in storage and a bathroom housed in two rendered volumes on either side of the central corridor.
The spiralling metal staircase is positioned at the corner of the creating and connects a reception region with the residing and dining space on the initial floor. A basic kitchen is situated at the far end of this storey.
The stair ascends by means of a double-height void between the living room and the top floor, which is designated as a studio area.
Corrugated metal extends among the beams on both side of the developing to support the floors. The underside forms a textured ceiling that adds to the utilitarian come to feel of the interior.
Photography is by Koji Fujii/Nacasa&Partners.
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