Next Project

Father's Atelier

Part 2 Project 2009
Taishi Maeda
Mie University Tsu City | Japan
The place “Father's Atelier” designed; Daiou city, is known as beauty spot many painters has visited from Meiji time (1868~). According to this history, people in Daiou have had a vision: “the town of painters”.

I felt strong power to create the town from many painters and I thought as if they were fathers for Daiou city. I hope many people feel paternity through this work…

Looking atelier and painting studio in this work, some people may bring back one day they enter their father’s library secretly.
Looking a painter talks with some friends and locals, other people may remember one father’s holiday.
Looking wooden house with some scores, paints, old tools, aged concrete in this work, another people may associate fathers aged back.

I hope many painters sfows beauty landscape including themselves and gathers people’s respect, like a father.

Taishi Maeda


The designer of this work, entitled "Father's Atelier," spent his childhood in this fisherman's island, Tohshi-jima, located offshore of Toba-city, Mie prefecture, Japan. The people's custom and life in the islands around is well known through Yukio MISHIMA's novel, "Sound of Waves." In the school days, he received an personal lessons on water colour drawing at an atelier of an artist, for whom he still maintains a respect as the "father in the art."

These two personal experiences are echoed in the work. The work itself consists of drawings in water colour wash, might be quite rare in this CAD age, which are really expressive and depictive, conveying not only his design but also the real atmosphere of the site and the environment. The work achived the highest score among 44 students in the votes of the faculty of architecture in Mie University.

The composition - the floating box from the heavy RC + masonry enclosure - maintains the spatial quality of labyrinth, the most important quality in the existing fisherman's village, as well as provides the bilateral view, from the atelier in the floating box and toward back to it from the narrow alleyways. In doing so, he intended to provide the new and unique phase of visual connection in this dense community.

His design process was very unique, too. He elected a scale model of the whole environment first, and designed in the model throughout the process. That means put and re-put building elements as if in the real historic transformations in a built environment. Although the building form is far from traditional eclecticism, the careful selection of local materials and renovation and reconstruction of existing building composition, helped the work finally achieving both vernacular atmosphere and contemporary clarity at the same time.

Tutor(s)
Assc. Prof Yoshito Tomioka
2009
• Page Hits: 3190         • Entry Date: 20 July 2009         • Last Update: 14 September 2009