S-House is a see-through glass home with an M.C. Escher-like interior

We’ve featured many examples of avant-garde Japanese architecture on Inhabitat, but this daring transparent home is unlike any we’ve seen before.

Designed by Yuusuke Karasawa Architects, the S-House is a glazed, split-level home that appears to offer zero privacy to its inhabitants. Located in Saitama, the 104-square-meter house was built with a complex and layered interior design that evokes M.C. Escher’s work ‘Relativity.’

The generously glazed S-House design is a continuation of architect Yuusuke Karasawa’s interest in “complicated network space,” a term related to how technology, like the Internet, has changed society. Karasawa captures that complex relationship in the home’s two-story structure, which uses zigzagging staircases and split-levels to create a complex layered interior. Although all floors can be seen at once—there are no full wall partitions in the traditional sense—the rooms are not easily accessed from one side of the house to the other. The interior layout and weaving staircases are emphasized by the addition of thin, fluoropolymer-painted white steel plates added to the facade of the house.

“The commonly understood three dimensional depth and the sense of distance are being disturbed, creating architectural spaces where various distances become complicated, much like what is happening in infospheres like the internet,” write the architects. “This architecture realizes such network–type spaces, where various distances become increasingly complex, as a “network of complex levels” in which multiple levels are networked and layered over one another.”

The interior is almost entirely finished in white-painted plaster board. The master bedroom and bathroom is partially located partially below ground and curtains have been installed for privacy. The S-House also contains an entrance hall, kitchen, living room, and guest room. An outdoor terrace lined with white ceramic tiles is located at the top of the building.