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Kengo Kuma & Associates completed new hotel in Japan
Whilst designign a skyscraper in a city centre, Kengo Kuma and Associates tried to recreate a close interaction between the site and the building with wood. Specifically, they designed the exterior as a stone lattice, rather than a wall. In order to make a delicate facade, neither from a block of stone nor a skin of glass, they chose to place the stone into the aluminium curtain wall by a dry construction method, which could reach the scale of 300mm. It would have been difficult to do so with the conventional PC curtain wall.
In the lower level of the hotel, they used the vocabulary of ‘shed', ‘detached house' and ‘gardening of the rooftop' and designed the garden as its own, but to be united with that of the neighbouring Hie Jinja Shrine.For the interior space, a wooden structure with an entablature motif was inserted as the secondary scale to the concrete skeleton to obtain the sense of the shed. The ‘detached house' is itself unified with its neighbouring site and apertures were made on the screen between the two.
By accumulating a number of methods, which Kengo Kuma and Associates had experimented with in smaller buildings, they challenged the way to make screens with materials themselves.
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