風間家旧別邸 釈迦堂ティーハウス Shakado Tea House: A small tea ceremony house with an open corridor

 

•TEA HOUSE is an annex to Shaka-Do [Buddha-house], which was built in 1910 as a second house of Mr. Koemon Kazama, a distinguished business leader of this region and a passionate devotee of Buddhism. Kazama family, now living in Shaka-Do opened the house to the public with a beautiful Japanese garden and it has become a popular place for city people and was registered as a national cultural asset of a typical Japanese style house.

•I was commissioned to design an additional place available for the family and visitors. After researching a huge premise of the family we proposed to reuse a small tatami [straw mat] room of an empty decayed house in a nook of the garden and place it in the midst of the garden to be a tea ceremony arbor. Then we connected the tatami room, reborn as a tea ceremony arbor (Fig-1､-6), and Shaka-Do with a cloister that consisted of an open corridor with columns and a small gallery with a kitchen (Fig-3).

 

•First, we thought it very important that how we should set a modern cloister between two traditional buildings. Shaka-Do and the tatami room have characteristic boundaries between the inside and outside (Fig2). There are no fixed walls but Engawa [veranda], intermediary space for the inside and the outside. We regard the corridor of the cloister as intermediary space for the gallery and the court. The corridor and the gallery are both ceiled with cedar wood strips and the corridor floor of dark gray tiles, laid diagonal, is extended to the interior space. Then the small and narrow gallery got an expanded impression of space like traditional Japanese architecture and exterior court and interior spaces interpenetrate each other (Fig-5).

• Secondly we tried to provide harmony with the historic surroundings. Exterior walls were finished with cedar siding, plaster and small color-stainless sheet metal, which was set diagonal (Fig-4) as floor tiles were laid, in a Japanese traditional way. The cloister has a vaulted roof, following the shape of an existing small gate roof (Fig-2) adjacent to the cloister. The roof was also covered with color-stainless sheet metal that matched with the atmosphere. The height of the building was kept low.   

•TEA HOUSE was constructed with a Japanese traditional wooden frame method and all timbers were hewed out of Kazama family’s own mountains and seasoned in the open air for a year.

Tokihiko Takatani

Architect/Professor

Tokihiko Takatani and associates, architecture/urban design, Tokyo

Graduate school of Tohoku Koeki Univ. Tsuruoka city, Yamagata

高谷時彦/建築家・都市デザイナー

設計計画高谷時彦事務所/東京都文京区千石4-37-4

東北公益文科大学大学院/山形県鶴岡市馬場町14-1