Atelier- Bisque Doll

atelier- bisque doll

principal use : house+atelier

structure:steel structure

site area : 328.16sqm 

total floor area : 151.76sqm

building site : Osaka

completion date : 2009.11 

structure design : Yasutaka Konishi

garden-build : Toshiya Ogino

mechanical : Kousou Katayama

Situated in a quiet neighbourhood of single-family homes on the outskirts of Osaka is the workshop and residence of two retirees. Having chosen to make her hobby of crafting porcelain dolls the focal point of their life, they asked Hiroshima-based architect Keisuke Maeda of UID (Universal Innovative Design) to bridge their working/living spaces, thus producing an environment that would generate visual wonder and underpin the stillness that occurs when a doll is completed.

Drawing inspiration from moving dolls, or marionettes. Maeda created an architecture of partitions. He negotiated the mixed-use programme through an interlocking composition of levitating bands, basing his design on three horizontal slices that divide the rectilinear house roughly into thirds.

Whereas the top slice, composed of steel walls, follows the exterior perimeter of the building, delineating both ceiling and roof, the two lower slices are fluid ribbons. Shilling and expanding to the boundaries of the site, these floating forms ingeniously juxtapose with one another - spatially, temporally and perceptually - at times even blurring the programme.

The bottom ribbon is the first wall that one sees when approaching the residence. Owing to the 1.4-m drop in grade from the back of the site to the street, this wall meets the pedestrian at eye level at the edge of the property. Floating out from the workshop, the wall supports an outdoor seating area and borders the garden and pathway to the entrance. Its partial screening surprisingly reveals torso-less legs, as guests make their way from a half-door in the wall to the east entrance of the workshop. The wall also provides a visual barrier between pathway and doll-maker, as she assembles miniature bisque body parts just inside her glazed workshop.

The ribbon continues its path through a glass-covered corridor that separates the living area from the working area. Completing the wall are white fusuma (sliding room dividers), which can be closed to shield all activity occurring in the front half of the building. It is in this corridor that the middle ribbon overlaps the bottom one. forming opposite sides of the passageway.

The overall effect is that of an interstitial space of both visual and physical mediation, running the entire width of the building- Only later does the corridor reveal its auxiliary function as the primary way to reach the main entrance of the house.

As the middle ribbon spans the studio's threshold, functioning as a lintel-like partition, it continues out. floating off the west side of the building and encircling another garden. A second footpath, required for the next leg of the journey to the main entrance, affords the visitor the only full view of the occupants' comings and goings. This ribbon returns to the back of the house, creating the opaque upper half of an external glass wall and. finally, finishing above the east entrance of the corridor/workshop space.

While attempting to map the manoeuvres of these three bands, you realize that Maeda's design has given them an additional function. Calculating the angles at which both pedestrians and neighbours see the top and bottom edges of the ribbons from various locations. Maeda was able to screen off many views through the expanses of glazed panelling into the interior without using conventional indoor window treatments. 

Maeda used the same sightline strategy in the interiors of both workshop and house. Within a relatively open floor plan, the visual shifting of surfaces and voids produces areas of seclusion without the need for interior doors (except for the door to the bathroom). Furthermore. moments exist in which the relative distance and position of spaces outside and inside blur as foreground, middle ground and background collapse into a single plane.

The walls' enormous loads seem to be supported by single panes of glass. Part of the credit for Maeda's clever concealment of the framework. which makes the cantilevering effect so dramatic, must go to structural engineer Yasutaka Konishi. Points at which the house appears to levitate - but is actually supported -include those in the gardens, in steel bookshelves and where the ribbons overlap.

The doll-maker has propped her finished creations with delicate precision against the glazed panelling of the workshop, further accentuating the abstract quality of Maeda's engineering mechanics. By dispelling the sheer size and weight of these white walls, the carefully arranged objects mirror the transformation that awaits the dolls when they are claimed by their future owners. Like a puppeteer. Maeda is the invisible proxy of his architecture's lévitation, making real what the doll owner can only imagine.

Providing inspiration for the rustic gardens of this suburban house were the nearby mountains of Minoyama. Here Maeda followed the lead of landscape designer Toshiya Ogino. whose compositional and manicuring techniques - seen in garden designs in Kyoto - brought a controlled wildness to the edges of this residence. Despite having only a narrow strip of earth to work with in certain areas, Ogino took full advantage of the thin vertical spaces between floating ribbons and glazed panelling, filling them meticulously with mature trees.

It is clearly evident that this design represents the union of a bold client and an equally adventurous architect. In many ways, Maeda's response reflects his 30-something generation, not least in the form of a refined and restrained monochromatic shell that hybridizes a range of spatial models from Japan's vernacular lineage. The expressiveness of this interior, however, demands special notice. As an architect based in the same Kansai region as Tadao Ando. Shin Takamatsu and Katsuhiro Miyamoto. Maeda once again proves that a practice based outside the Tokyo region may offer clues to future trends in contemporary Japanese architecture.