Green Heights (group home for people with disabilities) | Shiro Doi

This project is the rebuilding of a group home for people with intellectual disabilities.
In the case of intellectual disability, there isn’t physical barrier. I think it is a psychological barrier between them and their community, and the issue of barrier-free communication within the community and their self-esteem is a key issue.
Therefore, I wanted to create their house that is modest, but that the residents can be proud of.
The mathematician Kiyoshi Oka said that mathematics is also emotion:
‘Emotion is always active, and intellect and volition are occasional phenomena, so that intellect and volition are based on emotion.’
So, I wanted to create a house that everyone could understand emotionally.
Natural light is an important element for emotion.
The architectural theme of this project was how to bring light into the living room and envelop the people gathered there.
The living room is faced to the north, but it also has a stairwell finished with Japanese traditional white plaster walls to allow natural light to diffuse through. And a large wooden window provides a stable skylight and a view to the sky, and the high side lighting on the west allows afternoon sunlight to penetrate the stucco walls, the wooden windows and the wooden pillars.
As The haiku poet Basho said ‘Enter into things’, emotion is the state in which things and mind are undivided.
In this house, there are many elements of emotion, such as Nishikawa's cypress and cedar wood(the local wood), Japanese half-timber walls and plaster, deep eaves with exposed wood, the nameplate of the house engraved with copper plate by the residents, the detail of craftmanship and the ever moving sky seen through the wooden window.
These plotted elements form a landscape in one's mind, which is the expression of emotion in architecture.