name : inaya
place : Awaji, Hyogo
This is the project to renovate a private house into a restaurant and boutique.
In the process of the site survey, we found that the house was repeatedly expanded, reduced, and renovated. It became older as it went to the west side. There was a timeline for the secular variation of materials in one building.
In order to inherit the continuous senes of old houses, we partially preserved the fragments of old materials that symbolize former life and arranged new materials in a line that serve as conjunctions for old ones. By arranging the materials to gradually shift from “artificial” to “natural” materials, from the entrance to the mud wall, we designed the axis of the scenes which inherit the space composition of the material timeline.
We had to demolish the wall to get into the oldest western room because the key was lost. As we gradually broke down the soil wall, we saw plants growing wild in the back. The photo above shows the moment at that time.
The withered leaves piled up on the ground show us how there was life even though nobody lived there. When we saw this scene, we hoped to preserve the current situation as much as possible and make a symbolic space. The original plant withered because of changes of the environment during the construction. In hopes of it sprouting again, we left the soil. And opened the skylight, connected the sky and the earth. We made the situation dependent on nature. The arrangement of plants and stones avoids artificial intention and leaves vacant space for changes.
Three months after completion, small sprouts of plants that had grown in existing houses began to grow. Gradually the wall peels off and assimilates with the soil, and the plants weather with the stones. We hope that the space will return to what it should be at the speed of nature.
