Tsunago

At the 2007 Milan Furniture Fair, the Japanese project developer Mitsui Fudosan presented a concept home called Tsunago, designed by Kengo Kuma. The home showed ideas and concepts that the company wanted to use in apartment buildings for the Japanese market. Tsunago means ‘connect’, and Kuma elaborated on this theme on various levels. A connection to Japanese culture was created by imbuing the home with elements of traditional (residential) architecture. The walls of the house were designed as bamboo screens, known in Japan as sumushiko. Kuma here not only interwove his design with the Japanese building tradition; the transparent character of the sumushiko also focused on the connection between the inner world of the home and the outside world. The floor plan was a simple rectangle, divided into quadrants. This type of plan is called a ‘rice field character’ plan, because of its similarity to the Chinese character ta (   ), which means rice field. Here, the floor plan was extended with a veranda over its entire width…