Waro Kishi + K.Associates

This house is planned in the suburb of a city located in the southern region of Germany, whose site is on a gradual slope overlooking a vineyard and a valley. It is a single family unit with three bedrooms, one small office space, and an open-air swimming pool.

The lowest level is occupied by a parking and the office, and the mid-level is for the bedrooms and a meditation room with tatami-mats, and the top-level houses a living and a dining spaces, while each floor is staggered in half of the floor level to produce a split level sectional configuration, following the gradual sloping ground of the site. Although a large one-room space on the top floor has a flat roof restricted to a certain  height, the different floor levels produced by the skipped lower levels provide a dining space with a single floor height and a living space with a one and a half floor height. The top-level space is a glassed box with two exterior terrace spaces, so that the scenery and he nature of the southern Germany can be fully enjoyed.

Those issues, such as the specification of the wall surface line, the restriction of the maximum building height, the constrained wall surface proportion caused by the setback from the adjacent land, and the limited opening ratio and the obligation to utilize the high thermal insulation wall because of the strict regulation of the total energy emission amount, are often new experiences. However, those building regulations themselves are the culture and the history of the architecture in southern Germany. I get confused but at the same time I enjoy the encounter with this different culture.