Nishinoyama House Kyoto – Sejima
Completed in 2014, the Nishinoyama House, designed by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima is a residential complex located in Kyoto’s suburban area. The project is characterized by its unifying structure, which holistically connects the ten properties with 21 individually pitched roofs, creating a series of internal gardens and alleyways.
The Nishinoyama House is a ten-unit housing complex located in a quiet residential area in Omiya Nishinoyama, Kyoto. The complex is built on a gently sloping site directly adjacent to a large vegetable garden that lends it a free and expansive atmosphere. The location also offers a distant view of the giant Daimonji bonfire on Nyoigatake to the east in the summer.
Characterizing the building’s exterior are twenty-one pitched roofs—each roughly the size of the neighboring single-family houses—that come together to form one large roof, looking not unlike a cluster of small traditional machiya houses. Each room is positioned out of alignment with these pitched roofs, creating almost as many little gardens and alleyways underneath the shared roof as there are rooms in the complex.
Housing units are scattered along with the sloped site, covered by two to three pitched roofs per unit. Some units consist of a series of interconnected rooms surrounding a garden, and others have detached rooms located across a garden. Each room also differs according to its roof’s direction and height, ranging from attic-like rooms with low ceilings and a down-to-earth atmosphere to rooms with lofts and high ceilings filled with sunlight. All rooms have multiple sources for both light and air.
