M Courtyard House
250m2 Residence Completed in May 2025. Chigasaki, Japan
M Courtyard House considers the solid forms of the house as a mediator between the inhabitants and the changes in the environment. As the sun moves across the sky, the inhabitants would naturally move across the plan, with rooms designed with temporal programs. As a courtyard house, the spatial programmatic logic is inverted. By considering the courtyard void as a sundial, the rooms receiving daylight will move across the plan from the south-west in the morning, north at noon, and south-east in the afternoon, and thus temporal programs are designed for their respective areas of the house.
The house is one of the first buildings in Japan to fully use recycled sludge cement (SRy cement) as well as reused sand and aggregates, a concrete mix developed by Sanwa Sekisan KK. The concrete walls are positioned to reflect light into the building at different points of the day as well as acting as thermal mass. Furthermore, the roof form of the house is designed without a gutter for the path of water to be visible during rain events.
The house also emphasizes the use of craftfolks and artists instead of off the shelf products. To continue the knowledge of traditional materials that fit with the climate of the area, we found local shikkui plasterers who also constructed built-ins, solid wrought iron artists to create salt resistant metal fixtures, Mashiko pottery from Hamada Tomoo for receptacles, and wood workers who have developed techniques of using solid wood fixtures that are resistant to warping.
