Natura March - April 2014 | Page 73

İÇ VE DIŞ MEKANDA KULLANILAN VOLKANİK TAŞLAR, JAPONYA’YA ÖZGÜ BİR DİZİLİŞ ŞEKLİYLE, HER HANGİ BİR KAPLAMA OLMADAN UYGULANMIŞ. THE VOLCANIC STONES ON THE INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR WALLS ARE LINED UP USING JAPANESE CRAFT TECHNIQUE, WITHOUT ANY CLADDING MATERIAL. Aray Architecture was founded by Asei Suzuki in 2009 with the Shirasu House being the practice’s first completed residential project. Before setting up his own architecture office, Suzuki was the design director for Tokyo practice Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP where he worked on projects including a similar ecological residential home with a tree-filled courtyard behind a glass-brick façade and a large art gallery emphasizing space and light. Located in Kagoshima Prefecture, the two-story Shirasu House was intended to accommodate a family of six with the client requesting an energy-efficient interior environment that utilized eco-friendly passive natural systems of heating and cooling. The solution was found in the production of the Shirasu bricks with volcanic Shirasu soil, stone and cement. Manufactured off site, these bricks are a type of terrazzo incorporating decorative and insulating qualities in a composite building unit. The color and texture of these bricks with their embedded stone pieces served to provide a common surface throughout the exterior and interior of the building. Aesthetic and ecological, these bricks with the embedded pieces of gemstone in different shades give the building’s spare geometry a rich and uniform texture. MART - NİSAN 2014 / MARCH - APRIL 2014 • NATURA 73