Tokyo Westward Group Energy Alternatives: Less Energy More Creativity

A Prize for Practicalities

Horizon House, the second structure, went to a far more radical extent, at least in terms of most student competitions. After the building was designed, it was built.

“That’s very, very unusual,” said team adviser Mark Mulligan before the event, which packed the Stubbins Room in Gund Hall. “Getting to build it was part of the appeal,” said Mulligan, a GSD associate professor in practice of architecture, who worked with Kiel Moe, assistant professor of architectural technology, to guide the students.

The team first won an in-house GSD competition early last year, then did an independent study with Mulligan and Moe. The team members represented a sweep of disciplines, which Mulligan said strengthened the final design. The members included student Matthew Conway, Robert Daurio, M.Arch. II ’13, Carlos Cerezo Davila, M.Des.S. ’13, Mariano Gomez, M.Arch. II ’13, and students Natsuma Imai, Takuya Iwamura, Ana Garcia Puyol, and Thomas Sherman.

They won the third annual LIXIL International University Architectural Competition, a contest that provides money for building the first-place design. The 2013 challenge was to design a “retreat in nature,” a 21st-century sustainable house that fit into a setting of ancient quietude in remote northern Japan. Twelve university teams from around the world were invited to compete, and three finalists made presentations that April.

A start-to-finish reality within 10 months, Horizon House gets its name from its intent to preserve a 360-degree view of the flat rural landscape in Taiki-cho, in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost prefecture. In winter the land is blanketed with snow, and in summer it’s awash in high grasses. To keep a view of the wide horizon from everywhere in the interior, the house’s living space was built on a wooden platform more than three feet above the ground.

Three team members traveled to Japan in April. Five were there off and on over the summer to negotiate construction details with local contractors, and three went back in November to see the final product. By then, said Sherman, the weather was like that of northern Maine. But Horizon House, with its heat-pump radiant flooring and wood-pellet stove, was a snuggery. Staying overnight in something you helped design, said Puyol, was a high point. “We had to move from models into something that had to be built,” she said.

Staying in Horizon House turned into a test, too. On Puyol’s second night there, a 5.0-magnitude earthquake rumbled through southern Hokkaido. “It works,” she recalled thinking, with another thrill. “The house is safe.