St. Voile Chapel | Kasahara Design Work

Text description provided by the architects. We designed the chapel of new construction along the Shinano River Kamitokoro, Niigata-city. It had been completed on September 2014.
 

On designing it, it was important to keep balance with the existing main building for wedding. On that point we designed the appearance of chapel with the presence as one volume which height is 14.5m. Roof and outer wall were finished with one method of construction and were trimmed a ridgeline as much as possible. I expressed a voluminous feel of the architecture by using natural slate with the taste of the secular variation.
 

The inside is the space that is clean with pure white for opposite poles with the appearance. The design concept is “Wedding Veil”. The white is considered to be the color that is religiously important from old days, the veil in particular has been conveyed as the thing which protected a bride from a wicked thing. The veil is symbolized that past life is over and is rebeared to new life. The new chapel is the clean space that the soft veils surround the holy ceremony and dance blessing two people.
 

We united pipes of 28.6 φone by one and made a shape such as the cloth to realize the image. These pipes are all arcs of same 5000R, and are reversed each line in the long distance direction. I expressed the movement that each cloth wavers by moving the position of the point of intersection of the arc little by little, and changing an angle.
 

The veil pipes make an independent structure body and separate from the structure of the skeleton. When we have a look up it, several pieces of cloth seem to dance in a ceiling flutteringly. The cloth catches the light from a ceiling and invests flare of the light in the whole more.
 

Receiving gentle light, veils seem to right wrap up the whole space kindly. I think that I was able to make extremely simple space while making complicated phase difference.
 

Architects: Kasahara Design Work
Location: 2 Chome-11-33 Kamitokoro, Chūō-ku, Niigata-shi, Niigata-ken 950-0994, Japan
Architect in Charge: Eriko Kasahara, Yumiko Ota
Area: 161.0 sqm
Project Year: 2014
Photographs: Nacasa & Partners
Collaborators: OGA structural engineers Shigenori Oga, DAIKO ELECTRIC CO.,LTD
Main Manufacturers: Takizawa Co., LTD
 

Available in: www.archdaily.com/621238. Accessed in: 11/21/2017.