The house grows larger with each story, suggesting the inverse of a Japanese pagoda that must terminate, this house could be imagined to extend infinitely. This expansion adds to the sense of fragility despite its solid form. The base is narrow, almost tentative, as if the structure’s stability relies on the delicate balance of its expanding upper floors, like the balancing act of a Calder sculpture. Each level provides a different perspective of the surroundings, a unique relation to the landscape, offering views that shift from intimate garden scenes to panoramic vistas of the city.

The house, as many houses do, begins with the plan. We have organized each of the three stories anchored by a series of cores that serve both as vertical structure and habitable functions for each level. This liberates the floorplan, giving an ample feeling of openness and flexible spatial configuration, yet also becoming a divisive mechanism, affording privacy to the different components of the resting quarters. Structurally, as in a tower of blocks, these cores balance each other out, but play back and forth transversely, not a repetitive lateral element on each floor, but rather a mechanism to give each floor its own character.

The house rises three stories, a distinct interpretation of ancient pagodas, an inversion of the type that allows for us to lose its spiritual connotations and instead become domestic. The black concrete, a stark material, plays off Kyoto’s historical textures of wood, paper, and stone, giving the house a presence that feels anchored and layered in a material history of place. Inside, the house embraces a cave-like feeling, a new internal world that works to enclose and release space, not dissimilar from the ever moving Japanese shoji screens of a traditional dwelling. The slight curved walls that encase the cores bring a sense of fluidity, while the window apertures pronounced as they are frame distinct views of Kyoto—a city where the past flows into the present.