This Is Not A House
That was all I was thinking when I began designing this project. This space is, on the one hand, a place for spending time away from work, and on the other, the very opposite, that is, a place to which work is brought. This is a place for spending both “idle time” and “work time”; the only thing forbidden in this place is immersion in the flow of everyday time, that is, “dwelling”.
This space is therefore probably closest to a room in a hotel. A person can rest or work in a hotel room. A hotel room can be used in all sorts of ways. However, it can never be an “everyday space”.
This project involved the remodeling of a condominium constructed over 30 years ago. The 43.5 square meter unit was stripped of all its interior finishes, and a shower/washbasin/toilet (there is no bath), a bed resembling a berth on a train, and a kitchen were arranged on one side. These functional spaces were made as small as possible in size, but their dimensions and materiality were carefully considered.
The remaining half of the unit is a space 2.9 meters wide and 10.5 meters deep–a deep, functionless space that is meant to be out of the ordinary in character. Beyond the window lies the Pacific Ocean.
By arranging functional spaces of minimal size that are almost smaller than humanly-scaled on the left side, I emphasized the deep space on the right side and the limitless ocean beyond that space.
A single wall lined with dark brown wood panels of different lengths separates the two spaces. Looking back, I see that erecting the wall in a space of limitless extension was the one thing I wanted to do in this project.
