CODA : komorebi
Location:Miami, FL, USA
Year: Undergraduate 5th Year
Semester: Spring 2025
Professor:Florian Sauter
*All drawings completed by myself
komorebi (木漏れ日) : (kō-mō-reh-bē) ; sunlight leaking through trees
Coda: (kōdə) : the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure.
CODA Imagines a house for the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, nestled within Simpson Park in miami, a dense native hammock isolated within the landscape of the city’s urban center. The design takes the programmatic concept of the composer’s home and rearranges it into solid and void, public and private, with the private programs of the home (clean, sleep, music, and genkan) embedded within large concrete “crystals” which also serve as the main structure. The rest of the programs are left flexible on two slabs, compleetely transparent, ,and only punctured to allow for existing trees, thus making the living spaces inhabit the voids left beind by the natural forest structure.
expression.
music to geometry.
When first visiting the site for the purpose of this project, I was drawn to the way the light filtered through the dense canopy, and decided to use my 1960s film camera to purposely unfocus the image and only capture the light in an unfocused bokeh. Captured in black and white, this became the initial concept for the play of solids and voids.
In order to connect the design to Sakamoto’s music, I created a series of paintings of acrylic gouache on paper which captured a form of “notation” based on the shapes and monochromatic patterns I inherently associated with his music. Each painted piece came to be a “notation” of a separate composition of my favourite of Sakamoto’s albums, andata. These pieces came to become the inspiration for the form of the house, with solid volumes being placed in an endless sea of noise (in this case, the natural context of the park itself).
In an attempt to preserve as many trees on the chosen location as possible, the two main slabs that connected the different concrete program volumes was punctured by holes of different radii, encased by cylindrical glass to maintain the separation of interior to exterior. For the exterior perimeter channel glass was chosen in order to diffuse the horizontal view (connecting back to the original images of unfocused light) as well as forcing the view to be of the forest floor and canopy accessible through the glass ceiling and floor present in the western portion of the house facing away from the public path. The concrete volumes would house Sakamoto’s music studio, bedroom, bathroom, and genkan (Japanese style entry area) as well as an “unfinished” volume providing an exterior terrace overlooking the surrounding environment while still blocking off the path.
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noise diagram.
image.
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elevations + roof plan.
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1/4"=1' physical model
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axonometric render.
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