STUDY ON THE LIVING HISTORY AND INFILL RENOVATION

The apartment designed based on KEP system in Estate Tsurumaki-3

Abstract

The authors investigated the housing estate “Tsurumaki -3” of Tama New Town in the west suburb of Tokyo. It was one of the first experimental project, named KEP (Kodan Experimental housing Project) which Japanese Housing Corporation started in 1973 in order to research and develop the flexibility and adaptability of housing. The most important object of this research is to investigate how residents have adopted the design concepts to suit their individual needs and how they have adapted their living environments to changes in their lifestyles over time by remodeling rooms and changing the position of partitions, especially that of KEP movable partitioning system. The authors found some residents renovated their units by relocating the KEP movable partitions and storage systems and some residents did not. As children grew, and as they left home, some families used the KEP system to adjust the room arrangements to fit their changing lifestyles. This study has confirmed the effectiveness of KEP in introducing movable storage walls and movable partitions in a family dwelling unit of about 90 m², with the aim of changing the floor plan without significant financial burden or impact on life.

 

The English translations of the Fig.4 not shown in English in the text are as follows.

Index for Symbols:

W: toilet, washbasin, B: bathroom, K: kitchen, C: change of storage, I: repair of infill decoration, S: moving or removing of KEP movable storage wall, M: moving or removing of KEP movable partition wall, M’: renovation of conventional partition wall, P: change from Japanese room to flooring room, F: comprehensive renovation by returning the house to the state of base building, O: repair or removing of water heater, ● [red spot]: change of the user of the room, mainly the room for sleep,

 

Index for the color of each line:

white: first living resident, gray: second living resident, deep gray: third living resident, light gray: unknown,

 

★１: the unit shown in Fig. 5 (3.4.1) ★２: the unit shown in Fig. 6 (3.4.2) ★３: the unit shown in Fig. 7 (3.4.3)

★４: the unit shown in Fig. 8 (3.4.4) ★５: the unit shown in Fig. 9 (3.4.5)

 

The grids with ◆ represent repair or renovation done in the year. The inferred durations are represented with dotted lines when the exact years of renovation are unknown. The red dotted lines indicate the lifestyle changes, the green lines indicate the layout changes (S, M, M’), the blue lines indicate the water section changes (W, B, K), and the black lines indicate any other renovations (C, I, F, O, D) that have been done.

 

*Note 1: the first column represents the types of each unit.

*Note 2: the red vertical lines represent the time that repair and renovation work for the base building, such as the repair of waterproofing and repainting of exterior walls were implemented.

*Note 3: Fig.4 is based on the analysis of data obtained from the 65 units that continuously contributed this research.