Hollow, House

At the southern tip of the Boso Peninsula, along an alley leading to the sea, the site offers no direct view, yet the vectors of land and sea breeze made palpable a skeletal structure intrinsic to the site, threading through mountain and sea. Rather than building a device for the visual consumption of scenery, the aim was to raise that latent presence itself into architecture. A hollowed cavern is juxtaposed with an autonomous gable-roofed covering; living functions are arranged below, allowing the house to retain symbolic autonomy while responding to the site's microclimate. Along the axis connecting mountain and sea, in response to the cliff ordinance and the site's geometry, volumes of 3 ken × 2.5 ken were staggered in a geese flight formation, distorting the gable roof frame—built from beams rafters at 910mm pitch—to shape the whole. By concealing the ridge beam, the outline of the frame is weakened, heightening the distortion perceived from different vantage points. Gardens and wood decks occupy the gaps produced by the staggering, generating a soft relationship with the exterior. The interplay of the cavern's central axis, the covering frame above it, and the staggered plan produced an organic variation of irregular sections in succession. It is this fluctuation—arising from the coexistence of terrain-as-cavern and house—that constitutes the architecture's own richness, emerging beyond geometric order. The inquiry continues into an architecture capable of holding such fluctuation beyond intended order: not an uncritical pursuit of openness, but one that, while planned, tolerates a certain looseness.