イドとセド (coming soon)
ido and sedo 2024
札幌と同じく積雪寒冷地である金沢に設計した別荘。敷地内の井戸を活かして温室を併設し、植物と共に暮らすための小さく複雑な敷地形状を最大限に生かした住宅。
Ido and Sedo — Between the Well and the Courtyard in Kanazawa’s Vernacular Architecture
The project is located in Kanazawa, a city on the Japan Sea coast known for its heavy snowfall in winter, humid and hot summers, and a historic urban fabric that still retains traces of its former feudal capital character.
During the site survey, I visited Seikouken, a teahouse within Kenrokuen Garden. Its composition—wrapping a layer of semi-outdoor space around the tea room under the conditions of a cold, snowy climate—left a strong impression on me as a form of environmental responsiveness cultivated through history.
The project site is located nearby, within a historic preservation district where a cluster of Kanazawa’s temples stand, though much of the city’s memory is gradually fading from the streetscape.
According to Noboru Shimamura’s Kanazawa no Machiya (Kanazawa Townhouses, SD Selections, 1972), a sedo is an outdoor space located at the rear of long, narrow townhouses in Kanazawa, functioning both as a courtyard and as a place for daily activities such as snow removal or laundry.
In contrast, the doma—a semi-interior earthen-floored space found within the house, including entrance halls, passageways, and inner gardens—serves as a threshold between the exterior and the interior. In Japan, removing one’s shoes is culturally synonymous with entering the interior; the doma occupies the condition just before this act. Although roofed, it allows outdoor behavior to continue within, its floor finished with rammed earth or concrete and set close to the ground, drawing the continuity of the exterior directly into the house.
In warmer regions such as Kyoto, these spaces tend to remain open and well ventilated, while in Kanazawa’s cold, snowy climate they have become more enclosed and internally layered. The coexistence of the outdoor sedo and the semi-interior doma creates a unique spatial gradient between house and climate, a distinctive vernacular characteristic of Kanazawa’s architecture.
This sensibility also resonates with the spatial structure of Seikouken.
The site itself once formed the center of a three-unit row house, and its boundaries follow the traces of former rooms, creating a complex, irregular shape. An old well remains on site, and the client wished to incorporate it into a small villa that includes a greenhouse. The front road has a long-pending widening plan, requiring the main building to be set back. Daylight conditions were studied through the narrow gaps between neighboring houses, which led to the placement of the greenhouse—and as a result, the main house came to stand directly above the well. Under the condition that the structure could be moved if necessary, a small non-insulated annex was placed along the road, evoking the presence of a temple gate. Beyond it lies a walled sedo that traces the site’s irregular form, followed by the main house.
Upon entering the main house, one first encounters a multifunctional doma space, and beyond it, the well itself. The well, though enclosed within the building, forms a semi-outdoor space shaped like a house. In many cultures, wells have long been objects of reverence; in Japan, they are associated with local beliefs and rituals of appeasement. In that sense, this “house of the well” functions as a symbolic presence, akin to a household shrine. A single column—detached from any structural necessity—stands slightly off the roof’s central axis, rotated forty-five degrees. Clad in lapis lazuli, the column acts as a monolith that marks the vertical axis of space.
At the center of the composition, a walled sedo connects to the building through softly articulated edges such as roofed balconies, verandas, and doma spaces, forming gentle intermediaries between house and landscape. This sedo recalls the spatial character of temple precincts in Kanazawa, situated between the main gate (sanmon) and the main hall (hondō). Through continuous dialogue with the climate and the site, a courtyard that could be called either a sedo or a precinct emerged naturally—shaping a relationship between inside and outside that resonates with the regional context.
