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012 Shattuck House.mp4West Coast House
3D model of a stick-frame house originally built in 1906. It's been remodeled a lot since then, but very little of the original structure has been changed. (This is an "as-is" model to use as a base for future work.) The house is built on a significant slope with a half basement, first floor that was enlarged at some point to enclose the original porch, and a slightly cantilevered second floor. Most of the windows are original, and some of them still have the beautiful shimmer and waves of drawn glass. The structure is partly inferred, but mostly measured directly.
Tsukubasan Country House
Usui House.mp4Tsukubasan Country House
This new construction was intended to reference the Itakura Storehouse style of Japanese vernacular architecture. The clients wanted a very simple, regular, symmetrical design, using solid wood (tongue and groove) walls.
Rin Rin House
RinRin House
This remodel was a small, traditional farmhouse whose owners wish to live as simply and traditionally as possible, with a very low carbon footprint. The house has no heating or cooling, so all traditional measures to ensure air flow were maintained or improved. Because of the poorly balanced original design, with few columns and no shear walls on one entire side of the house, some seismic mitigation was performed such as adding steel reinforcement and increasing shear walls.
石井邸0424.mp4Tuscan Style Remodel
This remodel was a stick-frame house originally imported from the US and constructed from a kit. The clients wanted a more open first floor plan with an overall emphasis on creating a Tuscan-style image, and prioritized the use of natural materials.
Tuscan Style Remodel
Koga House.mp4Modern Itakura-style Home
Modern Itakura-Style House
A Japanese vernacular house constructed in the "itakura" style: the shear walls are constructed from tongue and groove boards slid into a groove in the 4 x 4 columns that make up the vertical structure. In the formal rooms of the first floor, gypsum board is installed over the wood or in some cases replaces it, but in the second floor the walls are simply left as wood. The wood is Japanese Cedar (sugi), so it's quite aromatic. The visible columns in this house are a somewhat more expensive and higher quality Japanese Cypress (hinoki), but the covered columns and most of the beams are solid sugi. The beam and column joints of this building were all hand cut by the master carpenter, and assembled on site. The exterior is traditional exterior plaster with a wood "skirt" over the bottom 1.2 meters, to protect the plaster.
This building was constructed for a quite wealthy family, but is in total around only 2000 square feet in size, and is otherwise very modest by American standards, illustrating the strong cultural pressure in Japan not to stand out.
Mountain Retreat
Mikage Kitchen
Tiny House Design
This is a tiny house design exercise (14.5 tsubo: about 516sf/50square meters). Includes a full Japanese-style system bath, separate toilet room, clothing storage space, and a full-sized kitchen. First floor tatami area has storage underneath. Second floor space includes a desk under a sleeping loft.