This is a renovation of a building in Yashima, Takamatsu, formerly used as a teahouse and souvenir shop. Originally, it was a small wooden structure built in the Taisho era. Over the course of the Showa and Heisei periods, it was repeatedly extended and altered, its form changing in response to the needs of each era. By the time the project began in 2019, what had once been three separate buildings had come to function as a single, continuous, one-room-like structure.
The client’s request was to reduce the sales area, which had become somewhat unmanageable, and adapt the business to the present time. Yashima summit had once flourished as a tourist destination, with inns and souvenir shops densely lining the mountaintop area. As times changed, however, tourism began to decline after peaking in the 1970s, and abandoned buildings and vacant lots gradually increased. This building, too, had once served as a souvenir shop attached to a ryokan. The inn closed, the business changed its form, and only this place remained. This renovation was, in that sense, another act of adaptation to a changing era.
The renovation required the sales area to be reduced by roughly half. We studied plans that involved partial demolition and the renewal of the interior. Yet reducing the area by cutting away parts of the building may have answered the functional request, but it seemed to leave untouched something more fundamental within the building itself. As meetings with the client continued, I began to feel that the true appeal of this building lay in the traces of the family business passed down through generations, and in the marks of life accumulated here over time. These traces were also what gave the place its atmosphere. It began to seem to me that unless the architectural approach could connect to this history—to this small, layered history of the site—any intervention would remain superficial.
One day, after a meeting, I looked back at the wooden building once the customers and staff had all gone home. In that moment, it seemed to stand like an old tree that had remained here for nearly a century. I felt the weight that only the accumulation of time can produce. Countless layers of memory seemed to make the building all the more difficult to move, rooting it, quite literally, in the land.
Is renovation possible in architecture whose very premise is a strong unity between land and building, where the building seems almost to be part of the land itself? Wanting to respond to that question, I sought an approach that would engage not simply with the interior, but with the site itself. Sensing the possibility of relating directly to the land, I began a series of studies using a 1:200 scale model. This was not the more conventional scale of 1:50 or 1:30, which is useful for interior renovation planning, but a scale that could engage the surrounding environment and topography rather than focusing primarily on the building’s interior.
By changing the method of study, the central question became how the architecture might engage with the site-specific character of the place. That meant, in particular, how to work with what could not be moved from this site: the fact that Yashima is a cliff-like mesa landform, and the layered temporal history of life and trade that had accumulated here. In a sense, the project had shifted from the design of a building to the design of the land itself, including the existing architecture. If an architectural operation could maximize the latent potential of the land, then even if times changed and uses changed with them, perhaps new ways of inhabiting it could continue to be discovered.
Based on that hypothesis, we introduced a gentle topography within the site, creating hill-like places from which the surrounding landscape could be seen. The newly constructed undulations were conceived as a terrain that enveloped the existing building, while also becoming a building in their own right. By introducing partial level changes and some flat floor areas, places to stay were arranged throughout in response to the surrounding conditions. The ground floor of the existing building was opened up and came to function like a large roof, beneath which rooms were placed almost as though discovering the locations best suited to each function. The remaining areas became open, shaded places, like the cool shade beneath a tree.
Looking back, I feel that throughout this project I was continually asking how architecture might merge with the site-specific character of a place—including its topography, its surrounding environment, and its temporal depth. If that is possible, then the distinctions between new construction, renovation, and extension may not matter very much when thinking about architecture. What emerges instead is an understanding of architecture as a larger system: not only a building, but a field that includes clusters of buildings, infrastructure, and planting.
Architecture still contains something that cannot easily be shared through data—something that can only be experienced and recognized by being there. It may be precisely this quality that opens up further possibilities. Yashima is a site blessed with unusual topography, a rich natural environment, and a unique history that stretches far into the past; it was by connecting architecture to this place that new possibilities could be found. Yet this way of thinking should be applicable elsewhere as well. In dense urban contexts, for example, one could regard the existing building stock itself as what gives the place its character, and reinterpret that accumulation as the site’s own terrain or environment. To merge with what fundamentally forms a place, to reinterpret that place from within, and to redefine its value—this, I believe, is one of the possibilities architecture holds in the environmental age.
(Published in Shotenkenchiku, May 2023)