C/metal House / Yutarou Ohta
C/steel Apartment / Yutarou Ohta
Text description provided by the architects. This is the designer’s own residence, a renovated 30-year-old SRC apartment building along the Sumida River. He fell in love at first sight with the Sumida River, which has supported Edo (now Tokyo) as a major artery for logistics and has connected its culture, and dreamed of living along the river one day.
The existing plan was a typical LDK plan with private rooms connected by corridors, ignoring the special design conditions of living along the river. My birthplace is an apartment, and I felt that the environment of my parents’ apartment, which was separated from nature, was not enough for its convenience. By incorporating the Sumida River into the inorganic nature of the apartment, we aimed to create an organic lifestyle that coexists with nature.
As a starting point for the design, we studied the layout of the core. In order to make bath time the most important part of life, we placed the highest priority on a layout directly facing the Sumida River, with the core in the middle of the room and the studio connected in an L-shape. A half-unit bath was adopted, and a large acrylic opening was made in the upper part of the bath to enjoy bathing with a view of the Sumida River.
The open L-shaped space is connected from the earthen floor to the living and dining rooms in one room, and the workspace and bedroom are partitioned simply with transparent curtains to control the relationship between the spaces and the distance from the Sumida River according to the usage.
The shimmer of the Sumida River is reflected on the steel plate wall covering the core, natural light fills the room, and by covering the floor and walls with larch plywood, a natural gradation is created, making the Sumida River a part of life.
By incorporating the phenomena that occur in the Sumida River into the life of an apartment that is cut off from nature, we were able to discover a new way of relating to nature. The Sumida River, which has connected culture from the Edo period to the present, has given us hints for our future lives.
