Small Japanese shops (1/300)

[Viator]

Modern residential / single-family housing estate (1)

The typical little town or suburb of the Japanese city includes the housing estates, comprising of the traditional and modern single-family houses, sometimes mixed together and sometimes separated into more traditional zones with the newer houses inserted into the general urban layout unchanged from the Meiji era, and more modern zones, containing single-family or terraced houses, often arranged in repetitive groups in geometrical order, and sometimes the VIP villa residentials, more loosely arranged, with the individually designed houses. The modern bulding designs are frequently derived from the traditional Japanese rural houses, but many are designed as the industrial concrete architecture, flat roofed and cubic shaped, in the very characteristic style known as the minimalism (by architects such as Naoya Kawabe, FujiwaraMuro or Hiramoto design and many more). Minimalistic houses are being built too as infills on the narrow plots between the existing buildings.

House 1
Built from scratch with the facades based on the original design of the corner town house known as "3way House" built in Adachi in 2010 by NAF Architects & Design, in the "vicinity which has become district where minimum limit of the building height is 7 meters above ground." The original design was very sophisticated and non-standard, but I simplified it to make it more generic and user-friendly.

[Viator]

Modern residential / single-family housing estate (2)

Houses 2 & 3
Built from scratch loosely based on the few similar infill single-family buildings, often two- or sometimes three-storey with the arcade or a single car park in the ground floor and the balcony or a panoramic window on the front facade of the second floor. The entrance doors could be hidden deep under the arcade. If there is a small garden in the backside of the parcel the second doors are necessary.

[Viator]

Modern residential / single-family housing estate (3)

House 4
Built from the rescaled sheets prepared by the Tokaworks Japanese architects studio after their own designs of real estate. The design merges the traditional elements (the gabled roof, the front wall with the dark brown insert and the set of narrow, vertical windows) with the minimalistic ones (the windows on the side elevations and the general cubic-like shape). There is eight different houses models to be downloaded for free from their homepage (1/100 or 1/150) and this one is the first I built.

To Be Continued...

[Don Boose]

You have replicated those modern building very precisely.

Don

[Viator]

Thanks a lot, dear Don!

Really, I am impressed with the Japanese architects' designs. Okay, the same kind of buildings were built (and are still being built) throughout the world, but there is some spiritual connection between the classic period Japanese architecture and these modern houses, although it could be difficult to simple pointing out, and they (or at least many of them) with the simplicity of the form, minimalism in details, narrow corridors and the mix of very small windows supplying the indirect sunlight and shadow and the big ones connecting the inner space with the outer, could still be counted as wabi-sabi aesthetics representatives.

Next I will try to copy the Yoshihiro Yamamoto Architects Atelier design of so called Narrow House, especially designed to resemble the proportions of the traditional Japanese house, including the interior and its narrow stairway and passages. I found its shape especially beautiful and harmonized.

[Don Boose]

Houses for eels!

There is also a narrow house almost identical to the one in your image that was also inspired by the Edo-era machiya: Eel's Nest by Anonymous Architects

Don

[Viator]

Wow! Thank you very much! This design is very pretty too!

I love the traditional vernacular architecture the most, but I am really impressed with the minimalistic houses. For some reason these buildings especially fit the Japanese and Nordic environment (at least in my opinion). In my country they will look strange and I suppose they will very quickly lose their freshness.

However some of them are "oversimplified" outside but too sophisticated and strange inside (compare the Love House by Takeshi Hosaka on the images: )

[whulsey]

Just discovered this thread. Wow!

[Viator]

Originally Posted by whulsey

Just discovered this thread. Wow!

Thanks!

[Viator]

Danchi Hutch narrow house by YYAA.

The garden facade was altered compared to the original (it is not visible on the photograph documentation however easy to be deduced from the ground floor and upper level key plans): the wide porte fentre (garden doors) were made of the transparent plastic to imitate the original feature but the windows on the second floor are shrinked and not so numerous, because my model will be placed on the smaller parcel than the original building.