tamotsu ito architecture office This neighborhood, known for its pottery industry, is characterized by winding roads and sloping topography, where houses, tile and pottery factories, and concrete-block fences form the everyday townscape. We restructured “house,” “factory,” and “block fence” to create a single-family home for a young couple who have lived here since childhood.
Compared to its surroundings, the small-scale House in Tajimi embraces a bricolage of local elements, offering the possibility for their life and experience to expand outward into the suburban landscape. The house is positioned as a structure in continuous conversation with the land, moving between fiction and reality, abstraction and concreteness. This juxtaposition explores the meaning of occupying a space that seeks continuity while also embodying contradiction.
The formal attributes of the project-symmetry and asymmetry, material language, and fabrication methods-have influenced the narrative and atmosphere of the house. The tensions between formal types and narrative create an entangled condition, yet it is precisely this contradiction that becomes a strong narrative framework, providing a ground where regional identity and the young couple’s life can converge and grow.

tamotsu ito architecture office
tamotsu ito architecture office is a global design practice based in Gifu and Tokyo, Japan. With a strong spatial belief in creating “Non-modern Hybrid x-objects” with architectural design, across the regions, the office has designed various spaces for better lives of people and communities, and better built environments.