Inside / Outside

What if an outside wall of a house would be more than a stringent division between inside and outside? What if a house would be able to intermingle the inside and the outside?

Well, that's exactly what Sou Fujimoto achieved in their House N in Oita (Japan). In this project, parts of the outside are integrated in the building, creating a weird mix-up that's neither inside or outside. Or both, at the same time.

The basic idea behind this is the concept of stepped privacy, by nesting three cubic volumes in eachother. This makes the space of the building a continuous whole with different parts.

It might even be a bit like a traditional Japanese house. These normally consist of a ornamental garden, a transitional area and the living area. The last one is always the really private space with a exeptional position in the whole.
However, the way the walls are punctured has nothing to do with traditional Japanese houses - where the walls are mainly layers of translucent sliding doors on top of eachother. The wall openings of the House N are more like traditional western windows - whether or not the frames are filled with glass. The only way these resemble the traditional Japanese wall is by means of the roller blind, that can close the window opening to vary the privacy of the spaces of the house.