Projects / Dwelling     

Inverted House, Hokkaido, Japan

"House for enjoying the harsh cold": In the inverted house, the AHO team has minimized the heated area and surrounded it with a sequence of exterior spaces, each of them with its qualities and its unique microclimate.

Architect: AHO Team og Kengo Kuma & Associates
Published 18 Mar, 2016
 
Inside Room with sleeping bench.

Inside Room with sleeping bench.

The AHO team at work in Tokyo.

Entrance to the Indoor Room, looking straight into the indoor fireplace.

During construction.

During construction.

Outdoor room with table, and outdoor kitchen to the left.

Roof detail.

Indoor Room.

Outside bedroom to the right, with the Garden Room in the background.

Inverted House with the Garden Room.

Aerial photo of the finished house.

View from Outside Room towards south-west.

Outside Room with fireplace and table.

Snow drift diagrams. Section and plan.

Sun path diagrams. February and May.

Section.

Site plan.

Plan.
A. Garden Room, B. Outside Room, C. Room for Cooking, D. Inside Room, 1. Fireplace, 2. Sleeping bench, 3. outside hot bath, 4. Outside bedroom.

Roof structure.

Completion: 2016

Address:
158-1 Memu, Taiki-cho, Hiroo-gun, Hokkaido, Japan

View it on the map

Photo:
Laurian Ghinitoiu (building prosess), Shinkenchiku-sha (finished building), AHO Team (prosess)

In April of 2015, AHO Team from The Oslo School of Architecture and Design was awarded the first prize in an architectural competition hosted by the LIXIL JS Foundation. The theme of the competition was ‘House for Enjoying the Harsh Cold’. The outcome, The Inverted House, is a small guesthouse retreat, a kind of ur hut, in the wilderness of the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

The Inverted House brings the harshness of the winter environment of Hokkaido into the house by minimalizing the heated interior and creating a series of interconnected sheltered exterior spaces with various architectonic and micro-climatic qualities, with varying distance to nature, created by floor heights and roof slopes.

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