Featuring the 'Roof House' Proposal by Betillon/Dorval-Bory Architects submitted in the competition in Chiba, Japan. The eight proposed homes are based around the reinvention of something we are all familiar with - the concept of a roof. The project experiments not only with a space itself but also the human body in it, therefore opens new possibilities about how people live.

The 'Roof House' is a place with architectural, acoustic and visual qualities and allows for various spatial reconfigurations and potential developments. Some other effective strengths include a minimal use of materials, construction costs and the overall use of energies due to the grouped housing. With no protective walls and with only slanted roof, one might ask what happens with the climate on the inside, what is the ventilation like, what are the qualities of light and shadows and what would a daily movement within really be like? In their own words, the architects explain the concept:

We choose not to yield to the temptation of suburban individualism, one of the causes of the disappearance of social ties and greater consumer of land. Thus, it is in an elegant form of collective housing that we integrate our eight houses.  In a mix of collective courtyard housing and patio house typologies, we create a large volume in the periphery of the plot that clears the central space, large garden shared by the inhabitants. Then generating an atypical space, the eight houses assembled into a single stripe allow to create several types of habitat yet in a very regular architecture, with its repetitive and identical frames.