Skip

Abstract

The city of Kyoto is a network of paths and gardens bounded by mountain ranges. The urban experience is an intricate web of picturesque variety, permeable and continuous. Skip is a microcosm of the city—a miniature of Kyoto’s spatial structure. The clients requested the largest possible garden area, so the entire upper surface of the building became an accessible outdoor terrace. Rather than a floating Corbusian roof deck, however, it takes the form of a wide stair that begins at ground level, rises to the rear of the site, and then turns back to reach the uppermost terrace. From the street, Skip is a modernist box. From the rear, it is a picturesque garden. From the air, it blends comfortably with the tiled roofs and courtyard gardens of the surrounding neighborhood. Like Adalberto Libera’s Casa Malaparte, Skip is simultaneously a discrete object and an extension of the contours of its site—less a building than a landscape. Unlike Casa Malaparte, the circulation is a loop, linked to the street and integrated with the city—more a path than a container. Both floating above the site and anchored in the bedrock, Skip was conceived as a solid mass from which inhabitable spaces have been carved: a jigsaw of exterior canyons and interior caverns.