Mount Fuji Architects Studio

Building a land
A building can be made by two kinds of actions. One is to build a frame on the land. Another is to work on the land itself, or to create a land.
Wood and steel structure belong to the former group, and reinforced-concrete (RC) structure and masonry belong to the latter group. It is understandable if you think about building a house of wood.
To make upper structure is, needless to say, to construct a frame, and it can be said that to make lower part of RC foundation is to work on a sound land at low humidity. Although there is a gap in proportion, those two components make a building.

We, as living organisms, would feel sympathy and find value to ephemerality of a frame, because it stands and destined to rot and fall down eventually. In contrast, to land, we might expect and aspire to obtain permanency that guarantee good condition for survival timelessly. When we confront land in respect to architecture, there is always intention to create something like a foundational quality that promise good life beyond time.
At the tip of a peninsula, in the site facing ocean in the east, we set our stance on how to confront the site: It was to fully capture the building as a “land.”

The site has strong attraction; innocent nature of ocean, peninsula, and rock mountain which show rich and sometimes dramatic change by season and time. However, there is no protectors from strong wind and wave often attack the land, as it is at the tip of the peninsula, and a sense of threat is always given, and frame building is felt to be insecure.
We thought that what to pursue is to create a geography that expand the attraction of the land and decrease the threat of it. However, at the same time, artificial manipulation introduced into the enchanting but threatening “innocent nature” should be minimum.

In order to design the building that realize above thoughts, firstly we prepared a rectangular-concrete-solid of which size is 30 meter in width, 17 meter in depth, and 11 meter in height. The mold forms of softwood lumber were constructed at an angle that is coordinated with this land’s characteristic pattern, called “cross-lamination.”

We located the rectangular-concrete-solid along seaside in the east and scraped off the southeast upper corner with negative volume of 23 meter in width, 11 meter in depth, and 7 meter in height.
By the work, “horizon plane” raised on the GL+4,000 plane was created so that the building avoids storm surges, and at the same time, “L-block” was created so that the residential area is protected from seasonal wind from the northwest in winter and receives sea breeze from the southeast.(The L-block also trims away the scenery of industrial area covering from north to west of the site.) The space nestled in the wing confronts horizon spreading far east, as well as receive sunlight from south.
Until this point, the process is a kind of reasonable process for architectural geographic formation. Only one thing that we introduced in the process intentionally (or, we could call it “arbitrarily”) is an “angle slit” cutting up to the northeast direction.

It is a large stair inducing people to come under the L-volume and climb up until being released to sky and ocean. This first throw of the flow line of special angle connects inside and outside of the space smoothly, and created sequence to reach the roof terrace from where people can view Mt. Fuji, the last architectural peninsula. We expect that the introduced sequence starting from an angle line makes borderless and harmonious integration of whole space involving specialties of all the senary and environment, and moreover, relationships with suroundings. Those specialties and relationaships were obtained by the geographic works.
I think that we created “the land” architeturally, and by drawing special line on it, we created the “permanent palce to stay for persons.”