An Airy A-Frame Home Connects a Community in Rural Japan

"We aspired to create a buoyant and bustling hub," says architect Takayuki Shimada, speaking of the tent-shaped home he and his team at Takeru Shoji Architects built in 2019. His clients were a young couple who desired a versatile, semipublic home on their generational estate in Tsurugasone, a small agricultural village about four hours north of Tokyo. After witnessing the growing physical and emotional separation between rural families, the design team saw the project as an opportunity to restore a fading communal connection.

"The estate already contained an assemblage of buildings and farmland that depended on one another," explains Shimada. "Our design direction was to create a home that revitalized these on-site structures and had the potential to adapt to new functions as the need or mood changed."

The solution was an A-frame structure draped over a rectangular interior volume. A set of parallel glass doors in the central living/dining room allow air to flow through home and connect the occupants with neighbors passing along the adjacent street.

Shimada adds, "Instead of a conventional self-reliant building, we designed a space where workshops, meetings, and events can spill out onto the land, thus opening the home to the village." He describes the open-air sides as a deliberate measure to extend the building envelope with semipublic spaces.