Ishihara House, the Glass Block House (ガラスブロックの家 石原邸)

The house dates from 1978. It belongs to the series of reinforced-concrete houses that Tadao Ando built in the late 1970s, each organized around an atrium.

From outside, no glass block can be seen: like the 1976 Row House in Sumiyoshi, the house shuts itself off with concrete walls that have almost no windows, forming a large closed box. Only inside, on stepping into the courtyard, does a space appear that is enclosed on three sides by the glass blocks. These stacked blocks form the module of the whole house.

The courtyard, which seems dug into the ground, is of an unusual size for a house. The repetition of the blocks blurs the division into three levels and makes the whole look bigger. A shallow, vaulted transparent roof now covers it and turns it into an interior space.

For Kenneth Frampton, several features of this small house set out Ando's basic syntax: cast-in-place concrete left bare inside and out, and large areas of glass or glass block held in steel frames painted grey. The proportions of the shoji screens in the tatami room are echoed in the steel-framed windows opening onto the atrium, and the shoji have an affinity with the glass-block infill above. The furniture Tadao Ando designed at the time is still there.

It is a lived-in house: it cannot be visited.