You may find yourself visiting a shotgun shack

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, center, a principal at the Tokyo-based architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow, is working with Rice students this year to design and build a Rice Gallery exhibit inspired by Houston's classic shotgun houses. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Rice students work with Tokyo architects to design, build 2015 Rice Gallery exhibition 

Nobody will live in the shotgun-inspired home to be built inside Rice Gallery next year, but the ideas of many a Rice student will inhabit the space.

Students in a seminar led by Jesús Vassallo, an assistant professor at the Rice School of Architecture, are busy strategizing on the home’s final form with two leading proponents of small houses, which have enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent years.

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, the principals of Tokyo-based architectural firm Atelier Bow-Wow, are collaborating with Vassallo’s students to design and build a tiny home inspired by Houston’s historic shotgun houses, particularly those in the Third Ward. The students’ design will inhabit Rice Gallery from Jan. 30 to March 15.

Rice students discuss ideas during a session with architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, far right, and Jesús Vassallo, an assistant professor at the Rice School of Architecture. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Tsukamoto spent the week of Nov. 3 at Anderson Hall working with students on concepts for the exhibition. The structure itself, which Tsukamoto said will be a “dramatically distorted” version of a shotgun house to fit the square gallery space, will incorporate the best of the students’ ideas while serving as a home for their models and drawings.

“We will try to apply the same principles of the shotgun house to the installation,” Tsukamoto said during his recent visit, his second of the semester. During their first in August, he and Kaijima delivered a lecture and took part in “guided research” with students in Houston.

Tsukamoto said his interest in shotgun houses extends beyond their architecture to the people who inhabit them, their materials and the social systems that have surrounded them from 1920 onward. “During the 20th century, the house became too dedicated to the nuclear family,” he said. “I think this has resulted in so many social issues today. So now I’d really like to shift the direction of the house in a more generous way.”

He speaks from experience, as his firm has designed many small houses as well as often-portable structures that redefine the use of public space in Japan and around the world for clients. Examples of their work for clients in Japan and around the world are available here.

“I think there is a potential client or owner of a new generation of shotgun houses,” said Tsukamoto, who felt the new houses would serve as “the typology for very cozy, comfortable living for a young couple.

“I think it’s quite important to reduce the size of the American house,” he said.

Vassallo said Atelier Bow-Wow is accustomed to working in small spaces and knows how to treat a public space – like Rice Gallery – in an abstract, attractive way. “The other thing they’re interested in is studying the evolution of housing typologies and the intelligence embedded in how these things have evolved through time – and how the architect has the agency to take these evolutions one step further.”