In April of 2015, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design was awarded the first prize in an architectural competition hosted by LIXIL JS Foundation, with an atypical theme: ’House for Enjoying the Harsh Cold’. The outcome, a small guest house in the wilderness of Hokkaido, seeks an intrinsic sustainability. By subtly controlling its architectonic environment, it maximises efficiency and performance of architectural elements.
The Inverted House brings the ‘harshness’ of the world into the house itself, by minimalising heated interior and creating a series of interconnected sheltered exterior spaces of various architectonic and micro-climatic qualities. The innovative architectural composition of walls, roofs and floor platforms is an attempt to create a strong experience of living within nature (even sleeping outside) through the precise architectural character given to each space. The Outside Room is covered by a large, gently sloping roof compressing toward surrounding landscape. In contrast, the Inside Room is grounded, narrow and dark, with a low view focused on snow or flowers in the Garden Room outside. The outside bath is hidden closely under the steep roof withstanding main winds, while the sleeping platform floats above snow, with a roof opening toward the sky. It’s a spatial parcours of inside-outside, with varying distance to nature, created by floor heights and roof slopes.
We imagined Inverted House as a delicate instrumentation of pieces, rather then one dominating concept. Each wall, floor, roof and pillar has been carefully considered in proportion and relation to the building as a whole and to the world in which it is built.