House NA

The house stands in a residential district in the middle of a dense city. Living among small houses and structures can be likened to living in a tree. A tree has many branches, each a place and a setting for activities of different scales.

What makes a tree compelling is that these places are not sealed off from one another but linked in their own particular way: a voice heard from across and above, a hop to another branch, a conversation between people perched on different branches. Such moments are the richness of dense living.

The house stacks floor plates of almost furniture scale throughout the space, so living areas are arranged by their relation to one another in space and time, much like a tree. It can be read as one large room or, with each plate a room, as a house of countless rooms, separate and coherent at once. Furniture-scale elements gather into rooms, rooms into a dwelling, and dwellings into the city.

The steps between plates become seats and desks, mark out territories, or filter light like leaves. They let two people be close, or apart while still sharing each other’s presence, and when guests come, people spread through the whole house in a network of conversation.

The white steel frame does not resemble a tree. Yet life within it is a contemporary version of the richness our distant ancestors knew when they lived among branches.