Project Name: House of Superimposed Images

Location: Nagasaki City, Japan

Design Team: D.A.

Total Floor Area: 94.34 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Tomoaki Kusunose

Feature: D.A.'s "House of Superimposed Images" demonstrates how powerful geometric forms and multi-perspective strategies can transform a coastal residence into a spatial apparatus that presents different architectural expressions as viewing positions change. This residence creates what the architects call a "polyphonic landscape" in dialogue with the region's layered history and dramatic topography.

This 94-square-meter residence, situated on the Nomozaki Peninsula in southern Nagasaki, faces Tachibana Bay to the east and rolling hills to the west. The site occupies a historically charged landscape where hidden Christian communities once practiced their faith during Japan's prohibition era, imbuing the seemingly tranquil scenery with underlying tension. Rather than presenting an architectural image through conventional single facades, the house operates by giving each elevation a distinct geometric identity, making the building clearly visible from four directions and interactive with its surroundings.

The project's most compelling design feature lies in its conceptual approach that refuses to settle into a single architectural image. The house acts as a chameleonic entity, presenting dramatically different appearances from different angles. This design offers a multi-layered perceptual experience of architecture, encompassing both its dynamic exterior that reflects the sky and its strategy of incorporating distant landscapes into the building's visual language through overlapping window openings. This deliberate complexity creates a more profound and multi-dimensional relationship with place than traditional residential architecture typically allows.

D.A.'s design language fluently expresses a multi-perspective strategy of facade transformation. The raw galvalume steel cladding acts as a reflective surface, mirroring the sky's changing moods throughout the day. Overlapping window openings frame distant landscapes, incorporating the surrounding environment's Tachibana Bay seascapes, western hills, and local architectural characteristics into the architectural expression. Depending on viewing position, the building can present the powerful qualities of the ocean, the intimacy of vernacular houses, or church-like verticality.

Most remarkably, the architects functionally and emotionally anchor the entire design through an interior spatial contrast strategy. Grey spaces are characterized by an irregularly applied aluminum foil ceiling supported by slender braces, capturing and scattering light from east and west windows. A black circulation spine winds through grey living areas, connecting semi-subterranean washrooms, main living spaces, and culminating in a bedroom that frames expansive ocean views. The floor plan employs a 45-degree rotated grid, creating multiple zones and sightlines through level changes and curved elements.

Spatial organization strategies permeate the entire design process. House of Superimposed Images transforms architecture into a tool of perception, simultaneously providing tension and relaxation contrasts, directing attention to the dialogue between natural scale and domestic life. The result is a home deeply attuned to its setting, where experience is continuously reshaped by changes in light, weather, and viewing angle. Every decision is intended to evoke acute awareness of the environment's multiplicity and complexity. The outcome is a compact coastal residence that transforms simple dwelling functions into continuous acts of perception, not about occupying the landscape, but about experiencing the vastness of nature and the intimacy of life anew through architectural framing.

Design Team: D.A. is a Tokyo-based multidisciplinary design practice founded in 1998, currently led by partners Taku Sakaushi and Hirofumi Nakagawa alongside associates Tamon Kotsu and Yuki Kato. The firm evolved from O.F.D.A. Associates, originally established by architect Taku Sakaushi as a collaborative platform for diverse architects working independently.

Operating from their Yotsuya office in Shinjuku, D.A. engages in comprehensive architectural services spanning planning, design supervision, interior design, and landscape architecture. The practice distinguishes itself through an integrated approach that extends beyond conventional architectural boundaries to encompass installation art, exhibition curation, research, and community development initiatives.

Between 2016 and 2022, the firm pioneered community-based design consulting in Fujiyoshida City, Yamanashi Prefecture, collaborating with municipal authorities and local organizations on vacant house renovations and urban planning strategies. This regional engagement established a satellite office that expanded their practice into territorially specific interventions.

Since its 2023 reformation, D.A. has emphasized location-independent and profession-transcendent methodologies, pursuing creative activities that maximize individual capabilities while maintaining collective design intelligence. The firm's portfolio demonstrates a consistent commitment to examining human environments through renewed perspectives, from architectural interventions to fashion design, positioning them as practitioners who resist professional categorization while delivering spatially sophisticated and contextually responsive projects across multiple scales and typologies.

D.A.'s methodology is process-driven, hands-on, and highly collaborative. The team rigorously explores ideas, values experimentation, and engages in the habit of testing-to-failure. The studio self-performs all digital visualizations, builds physical models, and creates scale mock-ups. The studio understands architecture as a framework to connect people more closely with the experience of context and a larger sense of community. The team seeks to create architecture that instills a sense of wonder in place and inspires a sense of belonging. The firm is mindful of the materiality of projects, sourcing materials locally and collaborating with local craftspeople wherever possible.

The studio's portfolio of project work is intentionally diversified in both typology and scale. The approach to creative process is based on creative problem-solving and design-thinking, understanding that a clear formulation of the design question is the first step in developing a design solution. This diversified positioning has proven strategically productive, earning significant recognition and publication coverage. D.A.'s work demonstrates that contemporary architectural excellence emerges not from formal innovation alone but from practices deeply attuned to regional landscapes, historical context, and human-centered design thinking. Its portfolio consistently pursues architecture that instills wonder while maintaining rigorous attention to craft, context, and cultural responsibility.