CHINESE-ARCHITECTS.COM: MINUS K
review of minus k house on chinese-architects.com website
press
JA82: ‘A LARGE HOUSE’ / 大きな家 BY KUU
‘A Large House’ is our submission for Japan Architect magazine’s issue Toward a New Cityscape (summer 2011) featuring 50 ideas from 50 architects.
“There is a grand house in Nanxun, a water-town near Shanghai. It is now open to tourists, no longer functioning as a house. This used to be the house of a powerful and rich local called Zhang Shi Ming. As a house it is too large to be called a house under our present notion of a house. It contains a rich array of interior spaces with many courtyards and light-wells. There are sequences of strange-sized spaces which we don’t know whether to call them “room” or “corridor” or whatever. The plan seems arbitrary and changed through the years; you can work out traces of what has been added when they needed more space. If you go through some spaces, you sometimes see special facades that suggest the importance of the spaces behind them. You sometimes come back to the same spot when you keep exploring. On the other hand, if you try to go back to some spot, you might find your path blocked.
It was such an interesting experience that we later redrew the plan of the house, which we found at the gate. Then we began to see how this large family used to live, a large family that is quite different from a conventional nuclear family. There is the head of the family, his brothers, sisters and their families, uncles and aunties, many wives, children and grandchildren, servants and the families of these servants. There might even be a teacher for the children or the family doctor, all housed under one roof.
We then tried to imagine how this real house can be used in the Japanese context. Because it is too large for current Japanese residential conditions, we started to divide it even further. We imagined and drew residential units for one person to units for three or four people. Sometimes we divided one unit into rooms on both sides of a common alley and made more than two entrances for most of the units. We kept thinking what kinds of life are appropriate for this house, and what kind of house we want to live in. It became an architecture that has much complexity.
There are two hundred and forty people in ninety five units living in this large house on a site of 7650 square meters. Although the size is almost big enough for a village, it interests us the fact that it is still a single architecture. The difference from villages or collective housing or typical apartment blocks is that we can’t have an overview of it from outside. An overview of it from outside also doesn’t mean anything. The normal way that we count the number of residences can’t apply here. Instead, we only have “this space”, “that space” and their sequential relationships.
In this way, this architecture denies the idea of interior and exterior or inside and outside. The current understanding of house as “shelter” doesn’t work here. In this large house that has shared walls and contiguous spaces, instead of its volume or exterior, you mainly recognise your house as a route to get from “here” to “there.” Or you recognise your house in relation to others, like the house “next to that courtyard that has a beautiful tree.” In there, your house is part of a larger thing, a larger environment. The composition is natural and simple. Each place is very specific, varying according to adjacencies: whether the space next to you is garden, corridor, courtyard, or someone’s room. Or according to size: how big they are. There is no place that is the same as some other.
The sense of community here can only be something experiential and concrete. It is different from the kind that we have to organise some event to forge a sense of community, which for us is a little too forced. It is not “community” as an abstract idea, but something that your body experiences in daily life. We live together with our family surrounded by various other people, in a house that allows various kinds of life. There is a sense of an environment that you cannot ignore in this large house. It is a sense of environment as something larger than yourself and your family; and you being integrally part of this environment.”
