This is a hotel in Beppu, Japan. It stands on a cliff overlooking the hot spring steam cityscape and Beppu Bay. All guest rooms have free-flowing hot spring bath. We designed it for those who want the emergence of a new culture connecting to local history, culture and nature. Its greatest feature is "site-specific" architecture and spaces. Those promote people to interact, and the hotel acts as a new community base.
Nowadays, we can get almost the same comfort anywhere in the globalized world, while the space of hotels has become stereotyped and "homogenization" is progressing in local cities. In many places, the uniqueness of region is weakening and the value of travel is diminishing. We wanted to change this situation through realizing this hotel.
Beppu's most valuable resource is hot spring, and its origins can be traced back to the orogeny. We wanted to realize a new characteristic architecture of the region by starting to think about the design from the unique terrain of this area that was born in the geological time. Assuming walls carved from the ground of a fault scarp, holes were made in the flocking walls like digging a cave to create space where one space and another space or the inside and the outside are connected.
This hotel has 33 general guest rooms, 2 duplex suites, a lobby, a cafe & bar, a multipurpose studio and terrace spaces. They are connected by semi-outdoor "alley space" where the vertical and holizontal axes intersect intricately. In walking around, you will be connect to the framed landscape through holes in the walls and feel the lights and sounds that permeate. It is a spatial experience reminiscent of geological time, and it overlaps with an experience of walking around the alleys of old downtown of Beppu.
The building consists of two buildings, a main building with public functions such as a lobby and guest rooms, and a restaurant building. The main building is a new building, and the restaurant building is a refurbished building that uses the existing building.
The main building has 5 floors above ground and 1 basement floor, and has 35 guest rooms. When you visit this building, you first see a long canopy that pierces holes in the walls. When you go through thick walls, your senses are like separated from your daily life, and you could feel the sound of water and the light that permeates through the holes in the walls and the floor slab.
Inside the hotel, you will see art, go through the holes to the guest rooms and restaurant, and experience the space like a town in an alley. Encounter catabolic landscapes framed by walls and holes everywhere.
The structure of the main building is made of reinforced concrete because it is necessary to make it a fireproof building. The production process for reinforced concrete construction is globally standardized. However, in creating the aforementioned "flock of walls as a 'carved earth' that continues to the fault scarp", we attempted to express the uniqueness of this building by intervening in the production process of reinforced concrete construction.
In this project, we have developed a new formwork. They are made of solid cedar wood from Oita prefecture. The surface of the cedar wood was roughly cut with sawed state. Since we designed gaps between the cedar woods, bumps appeared randomly on the surface of the concrete. The formwork was tough enough so it could be used 3 or 4 times. The repeating lines and texture created by the formwork generate rhythm that runs through the whole space of this architecture.
People come to rest their minds and bodies in this hot spring area. For such a people, we designed the concrete feel like rough mass of earth and made it the main character of the space, without luxurious decoration.
The color tone of concrete is reddish brown as a whole. This is not the paint coloring but the color tone of the concrete itself. We refer to the sample of the support layer obtained by the standard penetration test of the ground survey and the color tone of the innumerable "Beppu stones" underground in this land. The pigment component is an iron oxide-based inorganic pigment. There is a part using the above-mentioned sowing plate formwork and an uneven wall surface carved out by a water jet.
The restaurant building is a refurbished building that recycles existing buildings. When the client searched for land, a three-story reinforced concrete villa remained. The third floor of this existing building was reduced, which increased earthquake resistance and reduced the burden of regulatory compliance required by the Building Standards Act. And the view from the adjacent facility operated by the client was improved.
The existing part is also undergoing seismic diagnosis and reinforcement. On top of that, a steel-framed structure was added to create an extension that makes the rhythm of the walls coming from the main building continuous, so that the guest rooms can feel the modulation of the old and new spaces.
The restaurant mainly has a grill menu prepared by cooking in a stone oven. It is a dish that takes advantage of the flavors and characteristics of local ingredients. The kitchen is made of natural materials such as copper plate and Kyushu straw-filled shell ash plaster so that the space is compatible with the cooking concept. All the xylem that touches the hands is made of Chinaberry wood from Kyushu. It is similar to zelkova, but with a slightly softer texture. Although it is a broad-leaved tree, it can be shipped in the same period as cedar and cypress.