Bay watch.

Design of a glass pavilion floating on a sheet of water high above the sea reflects the ambiguity of a blurred horizon.

Design of this villa by Kengo Kuma & Associates was influenced by the writings of Bruno Taut extolling the virtues of simplicity and harmony between nature and artefact. The architect, who contributed significantly to the development of Japanese Modernism, settled in Japan 1933-37.

In his book, Houses and People of Japan (1938), he drew attention to buildings that to him were masterpieces of 'inner modernity', in particular the seventeenth-century Katsura Detached Palace. Its architect, Kabori Enshu, had devised a staggered plan which encompassed an informal arrangement of tea ceremony houses. Projecting eaves and bamboo verandahs shaped views of gardens with ponds, streams and artificial hills. Taut was ravished by the architectural simplicity and coherence of the building, which both framed and was framed by nature, and which inspired design of his only Japanese essay, the Hyuga Villa.

Kuma's three-storey villa has been built into a hill and looks south-east over the bay of Atami, south of Tokyo. Perched on the hillside, the villa seems suspended between sea and sky and Kuma seizes on the ambiguity, manipulating glass, water and light. His abstract architecture, which depends on the changing qualities of light and reflection, is a response to the atmospheric abstraction which surrounds it. At times, the separation of material and insubstantial seems to dissolve.

On the two lower levels, the main elements of the house--bedrooms, living room, kitchen and tatami rooms -- are spun round a central core. Depending on the privacy required, east and south rooms are enclosed by glass walls that frame and admit the views, with private quarters like bathrooms screened off. In traditional manner, the tatami mat is the unit of measurement.

The climax of the composition is at third floor level where, in an echo of Katsura's staggered plan, the building is surmounted by a glass pavilion. Detached from the main body by a glass walkway, it floats on a sheet of water under a glass canopy screened by silver louvres. For Kuma, the watery sheet which laps the edges of the building replaces Katsura's bamboo verandahs; similarly, the sheltering canopy, also measuring the building's extent and supported on columns, is an abstract echo of the palace eaves. From the transparent pavilion, the views are framed by beam and columns, mediated by faint reflections and seams of the glass enclosure, and by striations of light falling through louvres onto water that merges with sea.