Editor's Note: The following is a guest contribution from Houzz, a leading platform for home remodeling and design.
What will the future of home life be like? Part of the answer may be found in Tokyo this summer. The House Vision project, organized by designer and Muji art director Kenya Hara, is holding its second exhibition at a special site in the Aomi district of Tokyo. The show exhibits pavilions created by architects and others in collaboration with companies in the housing industry to explore and present their newest ideas for dwellings.
1. A community house welcomes guests from around the world
Airbnb, an online marketplace for short-term rentals, teamed with architect Go Hasegawa and, with the support of Yoshino Town, in Japan’s Nara Prefecture, built Yoshino-sugi Cedar House. This is a new endeavor for Airbnb in that the building isn’t an existing private residence, but rather a newly built home that will be operated by the people of the community.
The ground floor serves as a meeting space for the community, and includes a kitchen for preparing tea and meals. The table, tableware and other furniture and accessories are made of Yoshino-sugi cedar, considered the finest in Japan. The second floor is for guests.
The building will be relocated to a site next to the Yoshino River, so it was designed with a long shape for enjoying a view of the water. A room on the second floor provides a magnificent view of the sunrise.
2. Transitional spaces in expanded windows
A window is a two-dimensional interface between interior and exterior. Architect Jun Igarashi wondered what would happen if this interface was extended outward, made into a three-dimensional space and endowed with new functions. Inside-Out/Furniture-Room is his answer. Windows face outside and project outward to become spaces with specific functions: eating, relaxing, sleeping, thinking, bathing. But unlike the room in a typical home, these spaces have the quality of a transitional space between inside and outside.
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And when one goes through a window from inside the home, one enters another room. The furniture design for these spaces is the work of furniture designer Taiji Fujimori. Rather than just pieces stuck in a room, the furniture is integrally designed for the space. The result is a livable space that is a curious combination of cave-like enclosure and openness.
3. Innovations to the home’s 'wet area'
The plumbing for the bath, toilet, sinks and kitchen, known as a home’s "wet area," is usually installed under the floor. But plumbing installed in this way is not easy to move, and should the home be renovated, it imposes the limitation of "avoid moving the wet area" on the renovation plan. For a newly built home as well, relegating plumbing to under the floor almost always ultimately determines the location of the wet area.
A system designed by the LixiI corporation addresses this problem by clustering all key water amenities and directing pipe ducts to the ceiling. Wastewater is drawn up and away with a pump. This eliminates the construction and layout limitations imposed by underfloor plumbing, thus making it possible to install wet area equipment anywhere inside the home.
For the framework of Open House With Condensed Core, 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Shigeru Ban chose panels of paper honeycomb board pressed between plywood, a material typically used for shelves and desks. The framework can be completed simply by mounting the house frame to the foundation, and it also creates a spacious interior free of beams and columns. The roof, covered with a zippered, removable waterproof tent curtain, greatly reduces construction time and cost. Glass windows swing up horizontally or tuck away completely in a narrow storage area along the house’s exterior wall to create an interior fully open to the outside. The design is a pairing of technology that endows wet areas with mobility and Ban’s light, airy style.
4. A somewhat intangible house
From a broad historical perspective, a house served as a shelter that provided physical protection, and it held all kinds of physical objects for that purpose. But advances in technology, and in information technology in particular, have brought onto the scene homes that enrich living with a wealth of intangible things, perhaps in lieu of a lot of solid objects.
Enter the Hiragana-no Spiral House, enclosed in a circular wall. The interior has almost no physical objects, except for a kitchen island and a square core holding the bathroom below and a bedroom on top. The entire curved wall is a projection screen where one can indulge in movies and videos, music, and the internet via the Internet of Things from anywhere in the home.
The peak of the roof is topped by a "weather cat" sensor that monitors outdoor conditions and quickly notifies people inside of any unusual weather.
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5. Rethinking the rental
The typical rental apartment complex is a collection of private units equipped with everything an individual needs to live. The focus of these complexes on maximizing private space almost always comes at the expense of common space. Rental Space Tower, an experiment in redefining the rental apartment, takes a different approach.
Architect Sou Fujimoto’s approach starts with completely deconstructing private and common elements, and reconstituting them in a towerlike configuration.
While a private unit is pared down to a minimum of bed, storage and toilet, and occupies a space of 75 to 172 square feet, residents share common spaces and facilities luxurious for a rental apartment complex, such as a home theater, guest room, a spacious bathroom, dining room, library and communally tended garden. Corridors and stairs as well are more than circulation routes and can be used as small gardens.
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This clear defining and reintegration of private and common elements go beyond the conventional shared house composed of private rooms and a common living room, and have the potential to create apartment resident communities as vibrant as small towns.
The exhibition also includes Grand Third Living Room, which presents a new "glamping" style with solar energy generated by Toyota’s new Prius, and One Family Under a Wireless Roof, a pavilion in which viewers use a virtual reality device to see a film on family life in the Internet of Things era.