Hut with the Arc Wall

Tato Architects designed a public toilet at Shodoshima Island, as a part of the project of the Setouchi Art Festival.

The site is in the area called Hishio-no-sato (“Native place of sauce”) where pre-modern architecture of soy sauce making warehouse remains collectively most in Japan.

These warehouses are authorised as registered tangible cultural property, where soy sauce has been made still in the old-fashioned formula. Framing of a traditional cabin and large cedar barrels on the floor are the characteristic scene. It was decided to make the toilet adapted to such surroundings and make it be the starting point of a walk by partitioning the space with curved surfaces as softly as a cloth under a traditional cabin roof.

Due to circumstances on the site the construction had to be completed in about two months. Tato Architects tried to shorten the construction period by making the curved surfaces with steel plate and by, while making them at factory, proceeding with the foundation work at site at the same time. It was adopted tile roofing following nearby houses. Actually roofs with smoked tiles and glass tiles in mosaic pattern are compatible with each other thanks to the standardization, and they used FRP plates for the sheathing to make the place light as if sunlight came in through branches of trees.

The smoked tiles and glass tiles cannot easily be distinguished, during the day, from outside and may be mistaken for the same as the unevenness of the aged roof tiles of the neighborhood. But the difference appears clearly when night falls and light begins to leak from inside. The internal space will give feeling of being guided on while walking along the softly curved surface. Yo Shimada affirms: “I think I may have realised such a place as looks more spacious than actually is and as being secured while being relieved.”