House for Children

The plan is a crisscross shape with a long east-west main volume to which subvolumes are attached, thereby creating a public space and a private space that supports daily life.

The flow line is centered around a pantry located in the center of the cross-shaped plan, so that it can flexibly respond to various scenes that occur in daily life and avoid the monotony of the flow line that is often seen in simple one-story houses.

The site is 793m2, which is large even for a residential area in Saga Prefecture. When we asked the client why he purchased the land, he told us that he wanted to use it for his children's soccer practice, to invite people over, and to set up a store on the street side in the future, and so on, with room for the future.

We decided to extend a part of the deep roof on the south side of the house as close to the ground as possible, so that the house would stand on a lower scale than a one-story house in the vacant lot and the town. Underneath the roof is a bicycle storage area, and even children can easily climb on the roof by using a simple platform.

The roof can be accessed from inside the house as well, creating a large, three-dimensional circulation line that wraps around the interior of the house, the top of the roof, and even the ground. On the gently sloping roof, children can run around, lie down, and eat lunch, just like on a hill in a park. The whole thing is made to look like a hilltop in a park, with the lower roof slightly above the ground, which sweeps away the fear of being on the roof and creates a sense of security, as if the house were a continuation of the ground. The roof will become a stadium seating area for a mini soccer game in the garden.