Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 23hAn amphitheater deck runs off the sharp-pointed roof toward the Daisetsuzan range. Kengo Kuma and Associates keeps its satellite office on the same grassy plain, a spot called the navel of Hokkaido. 📷 Kengo Kuma and Associates 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 23hKitoushi no Mori Kitoron is a hot spring resort above Higashikawa town in Hokkaido, built from the trees around it. Hokkaido larch covers the exterior walls, locally cut birch lines the interior, and the same birch became the furniture, made with Higashikawa woodworkers. 160
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Shinichi Mamiya layered those concrete structures to stack the building's functions, keeping a multi-purpose program on a lot with no room to spread out. High ceilings and glass put the sky back in view from inside. 020
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Shinkoji Temple sits on a small urban site in Nagoya where fire protection rules are strict, so Mamiya Shinichi Design Studio renovated it in reinforced concrete rather than the timber and symbolic roofs that shaped temple architecture for centuries. 140
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 06/10/2026The name is literal: the reading space goes down into the ground rather than standing on it. That ground was flat and dry when they got it, and it was the lid of a valley that had been filled with construction debris. 📷 Koji Fujii / TOREAL 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Library in the Earth, completed in 2022 in Kisarazu, sits in a corner of KURKKU FIELDS, a working agricultural operation, and Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP designed it for people who plow on sunny days and read on rainy ones. 122
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Rooms inside stay clear of bracing, and the ribs screen the two wings, so both families face the same garden without looking into each other's rooms. 📷 笹倉洋平 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Ashida Nobuhito and Kawakami Satoshi pushed the frame outside the walls: long LVL beams sandwich 120mm columns, pinned with wooden pegs so the joints carry bending like a rigid frame. 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Chōgenji's new kuri in Osaka, finished 2024, houses two generations around one garden: a single-story wing for the parents, a three-story wing for their children. 110
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Kumamoto has an active forestry industry, but the price of domestic timber keeps stagnating, which is why a park toilet became an argument for log construction. 📷 yashiro photo office 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 04/10/2026A public restroom in Kumamoto made of logs. Yamashita Sekkei completed it in 2021 for Tatsudayama Rest Forest, a park locals know as the forest in the city, and used whole timber instead of milled lumber so the structure reads as part of the trees around it. Woody Farm handled construction. 121
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 03/10/2026The eaves on the facade are louvered too, dissolving the building's outline against the trees. The entrance eave is one giant TOKYO, the interlocking bracket system that carries traditional Japanese roofs. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 03/10/2026The Noh stage at this Higashiyama hotel is built from louvers, so you can see straight through it. Kengo Kuma and Associates set the hotel on the boundary where Kyoto's forest meets the city, making the stage transparent in pursuit of yugen, a subtle and profound beauty. 130
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Each of the renovated rooms has its own private hot bath and a layout angled toward the mountain. The largest, called SHUHO, once hosted Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Onyado Chikurintei sits inside Mifuneyama Rakuen in Saga prefecture, a 495,000 square meter property that holds only 11 guest rooms. Guests leave their shoes at a small entrance and step onto tatami, then follow window-lined hallways where the glazing pulls the surrounding forest indoors. 110
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 01/10/2026The balcony shapes ended up setting the room mix. 📷 Keishin Horikoshi / SS Tokyo 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 01/10/2026With no view to aim at, Shinya Kojima and Ayaka Kojima aimed at the gaps between them, carving a different balcony from the white volume on each floor: triangular notches on some, the whole front opened on others. No column lands in any of them, which took a braced rigid frame. 110
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Hotel Rakuragu fits 14 guest rooms onto an 84 sqm lot in Nihonbashi, boxed in by office blocks that share no height, width or material. #Architect 150
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Bathers read that as shifts in temperature and light moving room to room. Construction ran April to September 2024, and the architects say the building has no finished state and will grow old with its owner. 📷 Ozeki Katsuro 001
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Tokotsuku Architects turned an old wooden house in Sendai's Izumi ward into a 70.76 sqm public sauna. The renovation left the existing material as it was: gaps, stains, cold spots and dark corners allowed rather than patched, so aged boards meet new ones with no attempt to even the two out. 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 29/09/2026The roof, where wood decays fastest, was redone in aluminum printed with a wood grain, 35 louver patterns arranged at random to match the original variation. The old louvers were scanned in cross-section so their grain reappears in the end grain of the new metal. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Kengo Kuma's Bato Hiroshige Museum wears a screen of wooden louvers, an architectural translation of Hiroshige's rain drawn in lines. Twenty-five years after its 2000 completion the wooden louvers had deteriorated, and crowdfunding helped fund the restoration. #Architect 120
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Timber, single storey, 95.71 sqm, finished July 2024 after two months on site, all of it for talking to clients. 📷 ToLoLo studio 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Sakai of PASSWORK DESIGN hung a covering across the ceiling, one plane crossing entrance, lounge and meeting room so the floor reads as a single space. Lighting by studio tanbo hides inside it. 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Kirari's Hirabari branch in Nagoya is a meeting space for a firm that builds high-end exterior gardens, and the brief asked for a salon rather than a sales counter. #Architect 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 27/09/2026The reinforced concrete basement is modelled on a ravine, lit from above rather than through windows. Upstairs, toplights and high sidelights, a garden south, a roof garden north. The brief also asked for a quiet room to listen to music in. 📷 Koichi Torimura 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 27/09/2026FEDL buried almost all of this Tokyo house, completed in 2024. The site climbs 5m from the road and an apartment block looks down from the south, so to get the floor area the owners wanted, every room but the top floor went underground. #Architect 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 26/09/2026Steel tension rods lift the timber beams so the working area stays column-free, the forces left exposed above the potters. Folded FRP panels wrap roof and walls as one translucent skin, joined on site until the seams vanished. It changes appearance with the weather and the hour. 010
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 26/09/2026Tsukumo Kiln is a ceramic studio on a hill in rural Kobe with no front and no back. Dept. and OAAA built it from three timber portal frames, each rotated 60 degrees from the last, which turns the 80.32-sqm plan into an equilateral triangle open to the fields and mountains in every direction. 153
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Overhead there is only a light corrugated plastic roof, kept transparent so the wood and the sky stay in view, Kuma's way of carrying the Japanese timber tradition into contemporary materials. It stands on steel posts 60mm square. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Kengo Kuma's Horai Onsen bath house runs along a cliff slope in Atami, above the Pacific. The site is long and thin, so the undressing area, washing area and bath were set out in one continuous line, and the entire floor is laid in Japanese cypress boards. #Architect 121
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Hiroshi Nakamura and NAP covered its roughly 156 square metres with a group of timber cones rather than one roof, which is where the name Tepee comes from. Koji Fuji of Nacasa and Partners photographed it. The trees begin where the walls stop. 010
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Nasu, in Tochigi Prefecture, is known as a summer resort, and the approach to this house crosses fields and woodland before the site meets the forest edge. #Architect 110
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Artists were then asked to cross the line anyway, with a Mount Fuji scroll by Yoriko Hoshi. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Schemata Architects could not pin down why, maybe so families can call across it, so they made that height the rule for the 2020 renovation. Below the line every finish is skin-toned; above it the concrete structure is left bare. 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Koganeyu, a sento in Sumida, Tokyo, keeps the gap every Japanese bathhouse has: the wall between the men's and women's baths stops at 2250mm, short of the ceiling. #Architect 110
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 22/09/2026That width is hangen, a Japanese module. Note Architects kept the strip. Inside, it holds meetings and breaks. On the street side it is an engawa, and the spot where passersby pause was once hallway and closet space. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Office Nomura-Sanko belongs to a local construction company near a nostalgic shopping street in Tokyo, and the company wanted neighbors to feel welcome. Ryo Kamamatsu of Note Architects found the answer inside the old building: 910-millimeter gaps that had been hallways and closets. #Architect 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Inside, the same lattice that carries the structure doubles as display space for the museum's collection. Up top, the grid pushes outward so the upper part shields the wood members from rain. No glue was used to build it. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 21/09/2026The wooden grid on this building holds it up and holds the exhibits too. Kengo Kuma and Associates built the GC Prostho Museum Research Center by combining small wood members, each 6cm by 6cm, following the logic of a traditional wooden toy from the Hida Takayama region. 160
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 20/09/2026The plan borrows from how the island's villages formed, at crossroads where rows of houses met. The building's functions line an east-west axis and a north-south axis, and the space between them works as a street open to the community. That street is meant to keep going past the building itself. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 20/09/2026Ishigaki City Hall used to sit in a tsunami inundation zone, so it was moved to higher ground. Kengo Kuma and Associates used the relocation to bring back a familiar Ishigaki view: layered red-tile stucco roofs set among dense greenery. 101
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Local residents who worked on the town's recovery hand-painted the tiles in the spa areas, which were then made into two murals. 010
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 19/09/2026A fluid, undulating canopy tops the building, and Ban's trademark latticed roof structure stays exposed throughout the interior. Along with the trains, the station holds a public bathhouse. 110
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 19/09/2026The 2011 earthquake destroyed the railway station in Onagawa, Miyagi. Its replacement, designed by Shigeru Ban, reopened almost four years to the day later as the terminus of the line. 110
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 18/09/2026An engawa and an interior doma on the south side tie the rooms to the fields, built for sitting rather than passing through. The house it replaced was only 50 years old, tiled irimoya roof, good joinery throughout. 📷 Satoshi Shigeta 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Ryota Sekimoto of Riota Design rebuilt the main house of a pick-your-own farm in Kawagoe, Saitama, keeping it low under a koshiyane raised over the ridge. The proportions come from the farmhouses vanishing around it, so the new house reads as though it had always stood there. 131
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 17/09/2026The plot is flagpole-shaped, and the west side of the long approach path is reserved for fruit trees that will take years to mature. 000
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Deep eaves over the south deck keep it warm and sheltered in winter, and a tarp hung in summer turns it into shade. On the north side, a freestanding wall blocks direct sun from a second terrace. 100
Tatami Spaces @tatamispaces.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Tajimi in Gifu Prefecture is known for extreme summer heat, and Fumi Aso Architect & Associates shaped this single-story family house around it. The high ceiling and triangular roof are there to drive gravity ventilation. 100