Large roof is a bliss, but I’d rather have small
Keeping all my friends close, with the roofs of their own
Bring together the roofs, we will make it so large,
We will make it our city, we will make it our house
Nisshin Kogyo Architectural Design Competition organized by Japanese magazine Shinkenchiku is one of the most well-known competitions of architecture concepts. To mark its 50th anniversary, competition’s organisers have introduced the theme ‘Large Roof House’.
Roof is one of basic archetypes in architecture. It shows the way, how people’s perception of the house has changed depending on epochs and geographical regions.
We have come a long way to end up with unified look of a flat roof, the most common configuration used all over the world. Therefore, every house is a Large Roof House: an ultimate structure shared by the majority of people. It already exists, split in many fragments. While roofs are mostly flat nowadays, we can count how much roof there is per person.
For example there are 156,25 square meters of roof per person in Tokyo, one of the most populated cities in the world. Just imagine: if people carried these personal roofs above their heads, the city would resemble a giant self-shuffling deck of playing cards.
If the roof becomes personalised, it doesn’t need to be flat any more. Personal space is the area where people can express themselves freely. Following this fictional hypothesis people can choose the unique look of their own roof, regaining their own individuality as well as bringing back the lost grandeur of vaults, gazebos, domes and other expressive shapes from the menu. Maybe this is the key to feel truly connected with each other — having the roof of their own with ability to choose one’s closest circle.