Yasunori Kitao

A sustainable building method for the global environmental issues in terms of a recycable building method is an important issue for an approach of the city as a biotope. Recycle building is regarded as one of the method to make sustainable architecture – indeed this becomes more and more used in Japan. In our traditional Japanese architecture, we already can see such a recyclable concept. So it is a task for japanese architecte to connect modern sustainable technology with the experience of our traditional culture. As an example, we focussed on renovation projects of the traditional houses in Kyoto which makes sence because of the big amount of traditional town houses in this city and the growing popularity of renovation projects in our country in genereal. Studying the renovation process of these projects, we try to understand how the ‘skeleton’ and ‘infill’ can play a role in renovating traditional architecture. Especially traditional modular building system is focused on. In the essay we will show two new projects which have picked up this traditional building method, one of them a wood skeleton system, the other a concrete skeleton system for urban housing – both examples which show that we are trying to take over traditional building and housing concept in order to create a sustainable building method. Especially the condrete project endeavours to integrate green elements into building itself in an approach which is now connected with strong participation of the users. Looking back to our experience we dare to say sustainable design method can be generalized to each local culture.