Sky House / Kiyonori Kikutake

Sky House was the house designed and built by the Japanese architect Kiyonori Kikutake (1928-2011) for himself in 1958. The project still stands out as a landmark to his long lasting architectural convictions.

Sky House by Kiyonori Kikutake technical information

Architects: Kiyonori Kikutake | Works of Kiyonori Kikutake
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Area: 55.0 sqm
Program: Residential House
Project year : 1958
Photographs: Interiors © Iwan Baan

Contrary to the architecture of the past, contemporary architecture must be capable of responding to the changing needs of the contemporary era.

– Kiyonori Kikutake

Sky House by Kiyonori Kikutake Photographs

Sky House by Kiyonori Kikutake Article

Sky House was the house designed and built by the Japanese architect Kiyonori Kikutake (1928-2011) for himself in 1958. The project still stands out as a landmark to his long lasting architectural convictions. A founding individual of the Metabolist movement, Kikutake established the framework for a structural planning ready to characteristically give its own principles to development, and for new models of urban communities ready to create over new physical grounds. His own Sky-House is an elevated single volume that actually exemplifies both these key standards on a local scale.

The house comprises of a single 10x10m concrete slab raised up on 4,5 m high wharfs situated on the central axe of every side, with a specific purpose to free the corners. The piers additionally support the concrete rooftop. The architect’s refusal of functionalism is showed in an adaptable, open floor arrangement with a focal living space and benefit regions on the sides, which reviews traditional Japanese interiors.

Kikutake always alluded his own biography, which crosses the historical backdrop of Japan, to clarify his own elaboration of Metabolist’s standards. Child of a well off group of proprietors, he was 17 when the war finished and his family was all of a sudden poor after post-war changes. Confronted to the remaining parts of a nation that was intensely harmed, the Metabolists began to add to an outline state of mind that tended to the requirement for structures to adjust to the changeability of things.

The sky-house applies this standard on the little scale, tending to the variability inherent in a single family. The primary expansion to the fundamental volume was the kids room, a little space plugged under the floor, (a “move-net” as the planner likes to call it), which was removed when the kids moved away. Amid over 50 years a few changes were made to the Sky-house, some enhanced the building, some irrimediably modified the house’s principles.