Guesthouse Washin, Kiyoharu Art Colony
Yamanashi
2019
2019
This guesthouse stands on a site with a view of Mt. Kaikomagatake at the northernmost tip of the Southern Alps. The backdrop is provided by the Kiyoharu Art Colony, an art village encircled by old cherry trees. With a roughly three-hundred-square-meter hipped roof clad in copper plates and wood shingle, the guesthouse occupies the bulk of the site. The roof features blade-sharpened eaves, curved corner copper sheets known as hamaguri, and a characterful ridge beam of coarse red cedar that runs the length of the structure. Both the copper plates and the red cedar will blend beautifully into their surroundings as they age. The approach to the building on the northern side consists of a space like a moss garden at a tea house(roji)running alongside a wood-board fence and a stone wall. A rectangular path paved with numerous smaller stones welcomes visitors to the entrance beneath the eaves.
Intensely conscious of the building’s relationship with the garden, we deliberately created an impression of lightness by making the pillars so thin that the roof appears to be floating in the air. We did this by combining the traditional skills of the tea house carpenters(sukiya-daiku)as expressed in the wooden part of the building with contemporary construction techniques. Since the forms of expression we had chosen—such as minimizing the corner pillars at the open sides of the building—would have been impossible with traditional sukiya techniques, we gave the principal structure a steel frame and used solid steel pillars, fifty milli-meters in diameter, at the perimeter to support the vertical load. The horizontal load is borne by the wall that separates the interior and exterior, which we made as small as we could. The interior space, which accounts for just one hundered and fifteen square meters of the much larger area covered by the roof, offers the minimum necessary functionality, with a gallery for enjoyment of the garden and contemporary art and a single bedroom for sleeping.
A corridor-like half-outdoor space beneath the eaves acts as an ambiguous border between interior and exterior space. Takine stones from Fukushima Prefecture are placed as scenic stones(keiseki)in the garden, which is bounded with an arc-shaped wall of Aiki stone, a local stone with a distinctive tortoiseshell pattern. While using simple planar construction and clean contemporary structural forms, the building shows respect for the inherent natural beauty of its materials and blends harmoniously with the natural surroundings of Kiyoharu.
Tomoyuki Sakakida
Intensely conscious of the building’s relationship with the garden, we deliberately created an impression of lightness by making the pillars so thin that the roof appears to be floating in the air. We did this by combining the traditional skills of the tea house carpenters(sukiya-daiku)as expressed in the wooden part of the building with contemporary construction techniques. Since the forms of expression we had chosen—such as minimizing the corner pillars at the open sides of the building—would have been impossible with traditional sukiya techniques, we gave the principal structure a steel frame and used solid steel pillars, fifty milli-meters in diameter, at the perimeter to support the vertical load. The horizontal load is borne by the wall that separates the interior and exterior, which we made as small as we could. The interior space, which accounts for just one hundered and fifteen square meters of the much larger area covered by the roof, offers the minimum necessary functionality, with a gallery for enjoyment of the garden and contemporary art and a single bedroom for sleeping.
A corridor-like half-outdoor space beneath the eaves acts as an ambiguous border between interior and exterior space. Takine stones from Fukushima Prefecture are placed as scenic stones(keiseki)in the garden, which is bounded with an arc-shaped wall of Aiki stone, a local stone with a distinctive tortoiseshell pattern. While using simple planar construction and clean contemporary structural forms, the building shows respect for the inherent natural beauty of its materials and blends harmoniously with the natural surroundings of Kiyoharu.
Tomoyuki Sakakida
