Japan Today - Katsuhiro Miyamoto’s Clover House
This month is dedicated to Japanese architecture, so Japanese architects will be in the magazine and in the blog. But why Japanese architecture and not French, German or American? It’s a question of “style”: Japanese architects have built a (inter)national style which has deep influences in tradition, and are distinguishable from other nations’ currents, in which everyone carries out architecture in their own way of thinking. Today we find young architects (in the architectural world “young” means less than 50 years old) who have fully developed their own views on many aspects of building and who are already world famous or are on the point of becoming so: Katsuhiro Miyamoto, Kengo Kuma, Shigeru Ban and Satoshi Okada are some of the architects we will look at in the next few weeks through their masterpieces.
So let’s begin with Katsuhiro Miyamoto and his Clover House!
The house is on two levels, with the ground floor containing all the functions and the first floor working as a loft overlooking the main hall, the shape of which gives the name to the building. The idea of an underground house comes from the yaodongs, which are artificial caves still used in north China as dwellings. In the parts of the ground floor which aren’t touched by the cloverleaf hall Miyamoto has placed the bedrooms, the kitchen and the bathroom in tiny alcoves. The two levels are contrasted by the use of light: the underground darkness clashes with the entirely windowed upper level.
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