Naked House

Abstract

In the late 1990s, an unusual fax came chugging through the machine at Shigeru Ban’s Tokyo office. A man who wanted Ban to design a new house for his family — and whom Ban had met just once before — was writing to make some very precise and unusual requests about the project. The note explained that the man, who was in his thirties and lived with his wife, his two children, and his seventy-five-year-old mother, wanted a house for all of them that, as Ban remembers the man describing it, “provides the least privacy, so that the family members are not secluded from one another — a house that gives everyone the freedom to have individual activities in a shared atmosphere, in the middle of a unified family.”