Ephemeral House. Kyoto, Japan
Ephemeral House is a renovation project of a 100-year-old wooden building located in the center of Kyoto, Japan. Designed for an owner who was in his twenties and wanted a temporary dwelling, this house offers the owner a unique experience in the limited period of time by having ambiguous qualities.
Our intent in this project is both to generate an appropriate atmosphere for living and to create a space that has a rich sense of transience and festivity.
The same plywood material is applied on every existing surface of the living space except for part of the existing columns and hanging partition walls. The space, whose floor, walls and ceiling are united by the same material, provides the user an intimate atmosphere and an impressive sense of permanence like a cave, while it evokes a sense that the existing columns and hanging partition walls are added later. Here, the chronological order of the building elements, new and existing, is conceptually reversed.
However, in details, the surface of the wood constituting the floor, walls and ceiling is coarse and the studs are exposed on the back side of the wall, which gives an impression that the space is under construction or in the process of dismantling. The space, which at first is perceived as secure and permanent, actually seems to be fragile and has intricate time axes. What emerges here is a singular here-and-now space for living.
Design team: Yoichiro Hayashi, Shogo Sakurai
Photography: Keishiro Yamada
