Microhome Competition

A SIGH IN THE RIVER

Sparkling light, breeze, haze, and water, all flowing around the nameless but familiar people.

This place, the Tama River, humble but always plentiful, more than sufficient, has never lacked anything.

Our dream was to echo this particular “anima” in the space of a small, short-term retreat conceived for a young couple to vacation, rest, study, or work. We try to see things hidden behind something, this pure thing that doesn’t have a name yet, but all of a sudden, it might reveal itself beside a certain person. No matter how undefinable it might be, or rather, because it is so undefinable, we want to see it with our own eyes. And we wanted to know that it is all connected with humanity; then the mystery turns into joy and happiness.

A space just like that comes into being as something that goes back to nature as it is. Like a vessel that accepts nature as it is.

The scale of the space emerges from the natural environment, a landscape extending seemingly forever, the vastness of the sky, the lightness of a cloud, and the fineness of raindrops, considering architecture not as a shelter but as the environment itself. If architecture can be small and low density, or thin and expansive, we may be able to locate it in the intervals between diverse things.

We invite a sigh, to lose and forget things of all kinds, into a world of interacting and fluctuating relations, so in that vagueness, all slowly expands.

The different scenes of the home float lightly in the air, soft and fluffy like a cloud. The daily life moments, conversations, intimacy, move like an airflow, having no substance, disaggregated and melted between them protected under a translucent veil. Humans walk on the ground, fish swim in water, birds fly through the sky; the manner in which creatures display along the context can be interpreted by architecture in a similar approach of breath and freedom.

Sequences of ropes reminiscent of rain provide a fun itinerary when living. Depending on the scene, we experience, in each case, a completely different meaning. The couple walks infinitely varying paths within it and discovers spaces of all kinds. The space is regenerated each time, prowling between this artificial refreshing rain and changing its position; the spaces appear and disappear like bubbles.