Cocoon House / Studio Aula – Foamboards Blog

Architects: Studio Aula
Location: Shiojiri, Nagano, Japan
Architect In Charge: Mitsuru Yoshida,Kyoko Hoshina
Year: 2013
Photographs: Ippei Shinzawa

From the architect. Our client is a family with a couple in fifties, their two children and mother. In Cocoon house our mission was making-over in which the premise is narrow at the approach and deep inside. We try to functionally make use of it with its old garden. For instance, on the north side facing to a road we laid storage and space to take in light and winds.

The vertical bar screen in Japanese style blocks others’ eye and a fine devise to hold such functions. Also we put a multipurpose earth floor to make an entrance as well from the north to the south garden. This assures the functional elements such as a corridor and a storage space, also becomes a public space to combine inside with outside and to get visitors. The inside materials of construction are flamed in squares as iconic form, and the layer with the chequer patterns reminding of the thread of cocoon managed to generate the diversity of forms. We have also done the makeover of the garden. The old one was conventionally symbolic with chunks of stone work allegedly representing a ship on the sea. but we redefined it to satisfy the quality of life converting with the steppingstones led from the earth floor. Although industrialized houses are spreading over in the neighbourhood we have aimed integration of the old and the new in Japanese symbolic landscape.

Built in a unifom neighbourhood, this house aims at utilizing a garden with an old pine tree and the stone work and caring for the Japanese way of life and traditional forms; the earth flooor corridor works in some functional ways; the bar screen taking in light and wind under the large roof protects privacy; the bamboo fence encourages simplified maintanance on the owener’s own.

They used to live in an old house in a hamlet with depopulation in the Kiso region. It was a sericultural farm house built with wood, paper, and mortar in the Meiji period (about a hundred years old). Also Kiso is surrounded by conifer forests and clear water in a mountain range which is quite filled with natural beauty in Japan. The client loved the house and the neighbourhood, but an accidental mischief occured and it determined moving to a newly purchaseed secondhand house with a lovely old garden in adjacent suburbia.

After all this house turned out to be poorly earthquake-proof which leads to demolition and rebuilding. Our goal in this project is to capture Japanese style in order to confort the client family.

We managed to make use of much wood for the interior and the beam construction and to care for their remembrance of the old house and the locality. Actually they own a mountain forest in the hamlet and we used the Hinoki (Japanese cypress) timber planted in their son’s birth for a part of constructual materials.