Gallery in Kiyosato | Kiyosato, Yamanashi Prefecture | Japan | Satoshi Okada Architects

The building is a guesthouse with an art gallery for private art collections. One day in the late autumn of 2003, Client Mr. Aonuma rushed into my office with a magazine, in which House on Mt. Fuji is featured, and asked me to design “a house for arts” in a forest.
He, an executive banker at the age of sixty who has lived in foreign countries for many years, had dreamed to build a facility for pleasure with friends and art collections of ancient Buddhism sculptures.
The site is located on the southeast foothill of Mt. Yatsugatake, 1300 meters above sea level, where coniferous woods densely spread out. In the site, approximately 17 meters wide and 63 meters deep from a front road, the terrain is slightly sloping down from west to east by about 4 meters gap.
A stream runs on the east end boundary, from which a primeval forest, an untouchable nature, has been strictly protected.
When I visit the site in December 2003, the initial impact upon my mind was the verticality of larch trees; only their trunks were exposed because of the deciduousness in winter.
Intuitively in front of the site, first of all, I imagined to make something slender existed in the site. I would defer the dignity of life on larch in verticality over a couple of century old against the harsh climate; for instance, it goes down to minus 20 centigrade in winter......more