Azuma: Sky Lit House

One of Tadao Ando’s most prominent of his early works is the Azuma House.  Among his collection of early works, compared to most other small houses that he built early in his career, it is one of the most rigorous, dynamic, and deep designs, despite its simplicity, pure geometry, and small scale.  It is a small, minimalist house with very simple geometry.

Azuma house is located in Ando’s hometown Osaka, in the Sumiyoshi district.  It is considered a row house, because it is found in between a series of traditional wooden Japanese row houses along the street.  Most of these houses are either one floor or two floors high, therefore it is a low-rise residential district.  They were built by carpenters using wood materials.  Since they are vernacular buildings, there was no architect to design them.  They were directly built by the carpenters themselves with their hands without blueprints.

Ando’s house fits in between the wooden houses.  It stands out as the only fair-face concrete building on the street in between the long row of wooden houses that dominate the street’s urban fabric.   Even though the house has a different material from the buildings beside it, it still respects the scale, proportion, and height of the neighboring houses.  It is placed in a discrete way and doesn’t overshadow their presence, and fits into the urban context.

Through the skillful manipulation of proportions and elongation of the house on a small and narrow site, the architect manages to create a rich environment filled with drama, quiet, solitude, contrast, spatial sequence and narrative; all in such a small, simple house. Using simple geometry and forms, the well-designed proportions of the rectangular panels, are printed from the formwork or mold.  They accentuate the dynamic perspective through their rigorous repetition and well-placed horizontal proportions.

The elongated proportion of the house itself, and its long narrow space with a thin width and volume, create a dynamic perspective that crosses through the three main subdivisions of the house.  This is achieved across the central courtyard, through the glass walls towards the back end of the house, and the frontend in the opposite direction.  The horizontal lines of the interior walls in the perspective penetrate the vertical walls and glass panels towards both opposite end walls of the house.   

From outside, the house appears a blind wall with fair-face concrete finishing.  It has a discrete, bleak impression and is closed off from the street like a small bunker. However, as one goes through the entrance, dynamic interior spaces open up.  Light from the sky floods the courtyard and filters to the interiors.  Even though the interior spaces are simple rectangles, the courtyard in the middle of the house, which is open to the sky, connects them and provides them with a dynamic perspective across the axis of the building from inside to outside and inside again; from closed to open, to closed again; from dark to light, to dark again. This contrasting rhythm of triple consecutive spaces and their sequence in relation to each other makes this building very rich in spatial quality.

Even though the scale of the house is small and the proportions of the spaces are long and thin and narrow, the composition of the volume and the interior spaces gives the inhabitant a feeling of spaciousness and large wide openness.  The way the courtyard opens the space to the sky, and frames the sky above it, gives one looking up while standing in the courtyard a very epic perspective. It can also be described as a very epic skybox.

The house becomes a sanctuary, a small safe haven for its people to inhabit and take refuge in a crowded urban district.  The architect also placed at the entrance, an alcove before entering the house’s first main room, which is before the courtyard, to provide privacy and to add another layer of spatial sequence in the circulation of the house.  This way the spaces are delineated and have more meaning, and their accessibility is demarcated properly.

This alcove also acts as a breathing space for the visitor inside. It’s important for the visitor to catch his/her breath inside the house before entering the main functional spaces, to be greeted by the people living inside, and to provide the inhabitants with additional privacy from the visitors before they enter.

The spaces are connected to each other visually and spatially as if they are part of one long unified space, but at the same time they are separated from each other physically by glass walls, and fair-face concrete walls delineating functions.

Simple, subtle, design elements added to or subtracted from the composition of the geometry and the architecture, make a huge difference in the way the building is designed and how it affects the experience of the user inhabiting it.  Its completion comes in these subtle design differences and its details to form a substantial whole. Removing or adding any slight elements to the overall composition, makes the difference between a masterpiece and an underdeveloped house design.  In Azuma house, the architect was able to create such a masterpiece, with simple geometry at a small narrow scale.