Hayato Komatsu Architects

TSUCHIBA Connecting Architecture and Environment – The designer's own residence in Hiroshima City. When we visited the site for the first time, most of the site was covered by shadows caused by the tunnel and retaining wall that pass through Mt. Eba in front of the house, and once through the tunnel, there was a lot of car traffic, probably due to the factories of various companies. The site, with its irregular shape and negative conditions, was difficult to deal with in the surrounding area and seemed to be somewhat left out, but the expanse of lush greenery, which did not seem out of place in an urban area with a mix of houses and buildings, seemed more attractive than these conditions.

We wanted to create a relationship between the architecture, the surrounding environment, and the garden as a unified whole, not only by incorporating the distant view from within the building, but also by superimposing the near view that we had created on the environment. On this site, when considering the ground surface as the main subject of the architecture, it is unlikely to create a rich relationship between the architecture and the greenery, as it would only face the retaining wall and the shadows of the sun. We measured the height of each retaining wall, and found that the height from which a view of lush greenery can be enjoyed starts at about 4 meters above the ground surface.

The second floor is the main family gathering space, and a semi-outdoor space filled with plants was defined as a "tsuginiwa," or garden that connects the environment and the architecture at the boundary between the interior and exterior. By setting the garden 4m above the ground surface, the garden overlaps horizontally with the lush greenery in the distance, creating a landscape with depth. The tangen garden is extended to the southeast to allow light to penetrate to the trees, creating a geese-path shape with different depths, and the bearing wall is placed in parallel to the garden to modulate the sunlight and the line of sight from the neighboring land. The exterior form of the building, which is intricate with the tangen garden, overlaps with the view to the southwest of Mt.

The place defined as the tangen garden becomes the near view, and when it overlaps with the distant view, it becomes the landscape. The garden, raised from the ground surface, creates a complementary relationship between life and the environment as seen from within, and architecture and the environment as seen from without.