In a tightly built residential quarter of Kyoto, Alphaville Architects builds 24mm Plywood House, a two-storey home for one household divided by a single folded sheet of structural plywood.
The house stands on a corner in a densely built residential quarter of Kyoto, wrapped in fine-ribbed grey sheet metal and pulled up into a shallow gable. Neighbouring facades press in from three sides and overhead cables cross the sky above the ridge. From the street the volume reads as a shed whose openings have been cut wrong: a trapezoid sliced into the entrance, a triangle folded out of the upper wall, small square punches placed without symmetry. Nothing outside announces that a single household lives here.
Inside, the plan refuses the usual answer to a small footprint, which is to slice it into smaller rooms. The studio cut the house into two zones with different relationships to the world outside instead. Area 1 runs through the centre in a cross, taking in the entrance hall on the ground floor, where a large water tank for fish and a sleeping place for the dogs sit by the door, and the terrace above. Its windows open wide and pull the street straight in. Area 2 is whatever remains once that cross has been hollowed out of the house-shaped volume.
The wall between them is 24 mm of plywood, folded into a polyhedron rather than run flat. Thinness is the point. A thicker partition would shut the two zones off from one another; this one keeps them adjacent, aware of each other, never fully parted. Its facets catch daylight at different angles and throw it back at different strengths, so the two sides read as distinctly lit territories rather than as separate rooms.
Everything else follows the same board. Floors, soffits, stair treads and the zigzag stringers carrying them are cut from structural plywood with knots, mill stamps and screw heads left showing. Slender timber posts brace the void where the two floors meet through openings at the four corners, and bare bulbs hang from twisted flex. A glazed hatch set into the upper floor drops light and a slice of sky to the level below.
The reasoning is set out plainly. Living, the studio writes, is a series of actions such as eating, sleeping, bathing and getting dressed that cannot be split into tiny rooms. What can be split is the relationship to the outside. In Area 2 sunlight, wind and the noise of the city arrive indirectly, through small windows opened here and there; in Area 1 they arrive with nothing in the way. The occupant chooses which condition suits the hour.
That choice carries more weight now than it did when the plan of the Japanese small house was first argued over. A household working at home all day needs somewhere to be exposed and somewhere to be covered, without leaving the building, and needs the two to be more than a corridor apart. A folded sheet of plywood, screwed and left raw, turns out to be enough to make the difference legible.
