Japanese studio Kiyoaki Takeda Architects has completed a plant-covered house in Tokyo featuring vaulted slabs filled with soil for growing plants.
Kiyoaki Takeda, founder of Kiyoaki Takeda Architects, designed the Tsuruoka House after reading an article in the scientific journal Nature explaining that the mass of human-made objects had now exceeded that of all living biomass.
Kiyoaki Takeda Architects' Tsuruoka House was designed to include many plants
Takeda wanted to develop an architectural response to this alarming statistic and chose to design a house incorporating gardens across multiple layers that could support both plants and wildlife.
"Tsuruoka House is an architecture that attempts to hold not only people but also other life forms," Takeda explained. "By opening the garden to other available life forms, providing them with a place to inhabit, and co-creating the community, the 'garden' becomes an 'environment'."
The house's vaulted-floor slabs contain soil for planting
Rather than merely creating a garden that surrounds the base of the building, Takeda chose to stack the gardens vertically to increase the amount of space available for plants.
Unlike typical green roofs, which feature a thin layer of soil suitable only for growing grasses, sedum or mosses, Tsuruoka House's vaulted slabs are filled with soil that can support plants and trees with deeper roots.
The roof has deep soil for larger plants
"The thickness of the soil was plotte...