Ana House by Kochi

Ana House by Kochi Architect’s Studio is a small house for a family of four, built on a flagpole site surrounded by houses in Tokyo. The flagpole site is the smallest unit of land division, in a high density residential area, where land price increased exponentially after Second World War.

  The 79.42 square meters house had to be divided into smaller rooms. The architect’s design started with a desire to discover overcrowded spatiality: he took a grid and played with voids solutions. In order to create a “high-density scenery”, where plenty of spaces can be seen all at once, he set the formula “spatial density = number of rooms / volume”, stating that “if you can see many rooms in a smaller space, the space density will rise”.

Ana house features seven colours to emphasize difference between each rooms, and to increase space density. The shape of the void appears as an opening on walls and floors, where the cut surfaces of the four rooms can be seen: a high-density scenery in a compressed volume. Just like the Cubism disassembled the integration by visual parsing, placing multiple viewpoints side by side in one picture, obtaining simultaneity and transparency, the same way Ana House is an attempt on architecture to obtain a cubist effect, just by using a conventional wooden frame. Kazuyasu Kochi has been developing these principles since 2013, when he developed the Kame House, followed by the Apartment-House in 2014.

Ana House, Tokyo, Japan
Program: single family house
Architect: Kazuyasu Kochi, Kochi Architect’s Studio
Structural engineering: Yukihiro Kato, MI+D
Contractor: Siguma Construction Co., Ltd.
Site area: 91.31 sqm
Built area: 45.52 sqm
Floor area: 79.42 sqm
Completion: 2016