One of the most expressive manifestations of Japanese architectural poetics is a plan for a home in Onomichi, in Hiroshima prefecture, by Keisuke Maeda of UID architects, in which the relationship with the woods surrounding the house provides not only the inspiration for its poetics but the compositional reason for the organisation of space and the connection between functions, environments and human relationships.
The home belongs to a mother, her two daughters and their beloved cat, who wanted a project focusing on shared spaces and communal running of the home. This inspired the concept of the nest, a home designed by nature and a place where people could be together without any limitations on their relationships. Technically speaking, a nest is in fact made up of interwoven elements which make the whole structural: and so Keisuke Maeda?s home is the product of overlapping and integration of two levels, that of the cement forming the base of the home and that of the wood above it, represented by the floor and the external walls, acting as a bridge with its natural surroundings, both outside the building and growing within it.
Despite the repeated openings on the façades recalling those of the interior, the home can only be accessed from the stairs down to the cement basement housing the bathrooms and the mother?s bedroom, in a path through the architectural “undergrowth”, a true garden in which bushes and trees grow. Going upwards, we come to a mezzanine level with a kitchen and living room, and continuing upwards we come to another floor as big as the footprint of the entire home which interacts with all the others via openings created around them, underlined by light tunnels from the roof. Thus visual continuity links the kitchen with the daughters? bedrooms and these with the mother?s room in the basement and the garden; the trees are free to grow up to roof level and beyond, restoring the building to the forest around it.