Apartment renovation in the laboratory of Sakurazaka / Ikada + Masaki Iwamoto
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Text description provided by the architects. The project is a 30-year-old apartment renovation in Fukuoka, Japan, a home for me, my wife and our two children. Using movable bookcases as bedroom partitions, she designed a home in which space expands and contracts as the family’s shape changes. In post-war Japan, most flat units for nuclear families were designed for two parents and children, with the living room, dining room, parents’ room, children’s room, kitchen and bathroom in a small rectangle of about 80 square metres. What you see here is the one-to-one correspondence between the family model and the building plan.
However, the family grows and changes from moment to moment. Young children now will prove themselves and leave home in the not too distant future. It would make sense for parents to enjoy the space after the kids leave, but the compartmentalized rooms in a traditional apartment are too cramped to be reused and usually end up as a pantry filled with dusty cardboard boxes of memorabilia. Against this background, the idea was to create a house where the rooms could expand and contract as the family changed.
The bedrooms are divided into three movable bookcases, which can be spread out to create four small alcoves, or grouped into one space to create one large room. The space of each room can be freely allocated, and by opening the polycarbonate sliding doors facing the living room, the whole house can be transformed into one large space.
For materials and details, we sought practicality and objectivity. The everyday materials found in the city are reinterpreted and become architectural elements. Bookcases / movable partitions are by modification of ready-made products used in libraries. The sliding doors between the living room and the bedrooms are thick panels of polycarbonate with bars of corrugated metal. An interpretation of Japanese paper displays using materials found in the city.
To enhance thermal comfort, insulation was added to cover the entire unit, including the boundaries of adjacent units: in an apartment complex, heat transfer to the adjacent unit cannot be overlooked. The ceiling is lined with insulating panels backed by aluminum foil, a material typically used in the factory, which reflects the light coming from the windows and leads it deeper into the room. A window seat is a small piece of furniture inspired by the practicality of a Japanese room. It is a place to fold clothes and a fun playground for children. Cantilever swivel light illuminates a dining table or large work table. Like a tatami seat, its structure is made of stainless steel square tubes, balanced by a mass of lead inside as a counterweight.
