Theme description : A House with Resale Value
To have the ability for resale is to have a value that will not diminish over time. It is more than satisfactory if value will increase with the passage of time. Leaving aside europe and america, for architecture in asia, and above all in japan, “ increase in years since construction = decrease in value.” Amazingly, in tokyo the average lifespan of a detached house is about twenty years. When sites are bought and sold, if there is a building on a site, the cost of its demolition will be subtracted from the price of the site. For an architect, there is probably no place more appalling. What is the house with the highest “resale value” in history? If the frequency of being referenced is taken to equal resale value, then the villa rotonda (design: andrea palladio) is number one. If we limit ourselves to the 20th century, perhaps it would be le corbusier’s “dom-ino” system. The theme here is to think about the “resale value” of the 21st century house. I want proposals that consider how to obtain some kind of “value” that is effective for resale. In addition, i want proposals that are predicated on their chosen surroundings. If the architecture of the 20th century had a stand-alone “universality” with regard to its surroundings, allowing it to be reproduced anywhere in the world, the question here in the 21st century is how to incorporate the surroundings. In establishing local problems, even in distant parts of the world, it is important to make proposals that evoke sympathy by exceeding mere regionalism. I am interested in the responsiveness of the proposals to the “surroundings”chosen by each entrant. In my own design “space block hanoi model,” the starting point was notions of high-density living packed into an unusually long and slender strip-shaped site division. You may take “surroundings” to mean “ environment,” or to mean “periphery.” The ideas may also begin here. Needless to say, as this is the shinkenchiku residential design competition, with the phrase “resale value” i am not hoping for proposals that simply cater to commercial principles, or are about nothing but durability and sustainability. I want thinking about strategies that have a deeper basis. / Kazuhiro kojima