Eastern Japan
Kengo Kuma and Associates

Kengo Kuma turns stone into gossamer, wrapping the Lotus House, near Tokyo, in a checkerboard of wafer-thin travertine

	Click images to view larger
	Photo © Edmund Sumner/VIEW
	Kengo Kuma, principal
	Click here to see the people & products

A checkerboard wrapper of thin travertine panels alternating with rectangular openings forms a delicate screen that partially veils Lotus House, a 5,737-square-foot weekend home, some 40 miles west of Tokyo. With this unusual exterior wall, architect Kengo Kuma has explored what he calls “nonmonumental and transparent ways of building with stone.” He says he also intended the wafer-thin checkerboard as a challenge to the traditional Western precept that stone should play a load-bearing role (or, at least, appear weighty). Even before designing Lotus House, Kuma had a well-honed reputation for working closely with artisans and contractors to investigate the unexpected possibilities of natural and man-made materials. And while this project hardly represents his first experiment with stone, it is by far his most daring.

Here, the client’s love of travertine, imported from Italy, prompted the initial material choice. Kuma also took inspiration from the Japanese tendency to blur boundaries between inside and out, but he soon inverted expectation by proposing “an architecture of holes.” In fact, he envisioned the entire house—beyond the patterned, semipermeable wall—as a composition of solids and voids.

While floor-to-ceiling glazing and multiple entrances link Lotus House inextricably to the landscape, the building politely turns its back on its neighbors. Mediating between the home and its setting, the checkerboard veils parts of the front, sides, and almost the entire back of the painted-concrete building. Though the travertine wrapper filters, without completely eliminating, views in and out of the house, sliding glass walls open every major room to the lotus pond. When the window walls glide aside, the pool’s shimmery surface practically joins with the wood floors of the airy, casual bedrooms, where watery reflections ripple across plain white walls. By contrast, the travertine-floored, double-height living room, encased in fixed glass on three sides, is formal, imposing, and more removed from the water (in that case, the pond). There, the adjacent covered terrace softens the room’s hard surfaces. Though also grand in size, the cavernous, semi-outdoor terrace is defined by its intricate checkerboard rear wall that allows gentle breezes to flow through the house.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our April 2006 issue.
Subscribe to Architectural Record in print, or get Architectural Record digitally

Read more about the people and products behind this project.