studio tawaraya

This project is a reconstruction of a temple guest hall located on the banks of the Tone River. The building complements the functions of the adjacent Buddhist hall, arranging the temple office, restrooms, and other necessary rooms around a central double-height hall, all connected by barrier-free circulation.
The hall serves both as a place of rest for visitors to the cemetery and as a venue for large-scale Buddhist memorial services. In order to accommodate these contrasting uses within a single space, the design takes its cue from the former guest hall’s room known as the Hisashi-no-ma—literally, “the eaves room.” The hall is conceived as a place beneath the rafters, like an eaves space, while the rafters themselves are gently undulated into a hyperbolic paraboloid surface, creating subtle spatial differentiation within the hall.

* Hisashi refers to the projecting eaves of a traditional Japanese building, or by extension, the intermediate space beneath them.

Design: Studio Tawaraya
Structural design: Shimizu Ryota Structural Design Studio
Lighting design: tokage
Construction: Suiga