Project description by Atelier Norisada Maeda
Our recent residential project ORANGE is intended to realize a space where children can touch the raw world with their innate, pure sensitivity.
The concept has its root in my personal absorption in phenomenological and ontological spatial studies during college.
The strong interest came from my fundamental frustration and intuitive objection against the process through which a person – even though being born with limitless possibility about the ways to perceive, communicate and interact with and the world - gradually deteriorates to a stereotypical adult, or so-called “ordinary man” as he/she grows up. The answer seemed to be found in inquiry into human spatial recognition and its chronological change.
Instead of a lengthy abstract analysis, I would like to refer to one short movie titled "Sweet Baby Experiences Rain for the Very First Time". What it shows is a striking evidence that pouring rain – just an ordinary, cold, mostly unwelcome phenomena – is nothing but a sparkling manifestation of the world-in-life, or rain itself, for a girl who experiences it for the very first time. Even an ordinary rain brings an ecstatic joy to a person, as long as he/she maintains the fresh sensitivity to the world, or the rain itself.
Architectural space should have such a sparkling singularity instead of mundane machine-for-living efficiency, and it shouldn’t be easily lost through its daily use,: my belief is that an architectural work should always bring about a chance to activate the sensitivity to the space itself.
ORANGE is a realization of the parents’ and our wish that the two children living there shall not lose their pure sensitivity for ever.
A final note: the irregular spatial form of this project, in fact, was almost a product of chance. It suddenly came into this world when one of our staff was playing with a heating cutter, rotating a lump of styrene form as he cut it. At that point, he had no intention at all to come up with a sophisticated architectural design. True absorption in an innocent play with chance, in fact, was where we found the right seed of ORANGE, or the House for Children.
