02 / 08Cultural
Kōyō Pavilion
- Location
- Kyoto, JP
- Year
- 2022
- Area
- 1,120 m²
- Typology
- Cultural
- Status
- Completed
Narrative
A tea-culture pavilion of charred cedar slats, timed to the maple season it is named after.
Kōyō is the Japanese word for autumn leaves, and the pavilion sits inside a grove of Japanese maples on the eastern edge of Kyoto. It houses a small tea school, a reading room and a single exhibition hall, and it was designed to be at its most beautiful for the three weeks each November when the trees turn.
The building is wrapped in a screen of yakisugi cedar slats, spaced so that the interior reads as a series of thin vertical shadows. From inside, the grove is never seen whole; it is always fragmented, always partly withheld. The tea room floor is raised 900 millimetres above grade so that seated guests look directly into the canopy.
Structure is a hybrid: a concrete plinth, a glulam frame and a copper roof that has already begun to darken. Nothing in the building is painted.
Gallery
4 plates
