Dogo Miyu

Located on the hill of Dogo Onsen, known as one of Japan's oldest hot springs, Dogo Miyu was built on the concept of a place to "shed the noise of daily life and relax in everyday clothes," the "extraordinary in everyday clothes," and conceived as architecture that redefines Japan-ness (wa) at every scale.

To accommodate travel as a festive escape, Japan's hotels have grown ever larger and more multifunctional. But as travel shifts from large groups to couples and small parties, and daily life grows ever more hurried, what people seek from a hot spring is moving from liveliness toward healing and relaxation. The client saw this as a revival of the need for a modern "tōji," the traditional hot-spring healing culture, and boldly entrusted its design to us, despite our lack of experience with hotels of this scale.

The client, who runs three hotels in Dogo and helps lead the area's community development, set out, as part of a drastic restructuring of his business, to create a refined inn that would serve as the flagship of his group. What he entrusted to us was "a 'modern tōji' inn where one can savor Japan's oldest hot spring to the full and feel gratitude for its blessings," together with a concise request for architecture that evokes an "old yet new Japan." The Dogo Onsen Honkan, the symbol of the area, must have looked to the people of its day like a strange hybrid, neither Japanese nor Western. To us, the client's words felt like a spur, half scolding and half encouragement, inheriting the spirit of Yukiya Isaniwa, the visionary who built the Honkan and set in motion the town development that made Dogo the district we see today: "Do not be bound by established Japanese designs and motifs. Show us a new interpretation of Japan-ness."

The phrase that came to mind in response was the "extraordinary in everyday clothes." Not a fleeting, extravagant festival cut off from daily life, but a place where guests slip off, for a moment, only the troublesome parts of everyday life, the flood of information, noise and obligation, and relax in their everyday clothes. Such a place needs neither lavish decoration nor festive staging. The leading roles here are played by the warm, friendly hospitality rooted in the local culture of the Ohenro pilgrimage; flowers and grasses that shift with the seasons; the infinite gradations of shadow that nature draws; the faint citrus scent drifting in the air; and time spent with loved ones. We saw the role of architecture as creating a modest, almost transparent air in which guests can recover their delicate sensitivity to all these precious gifts of life and travel.

Japan-ness is not applied as a cliché of decoration or motif but governs the space as a set of underlying principles: proportion, horizontality, a low center of gravity, affinity with shadow, and a simple beauty born of limited materials. Drawing on the traditional tea room, often called a prototype of Japanese spatial design, and reinterpreting it in a minimalist contemporary language, we let garden and materials alike avoid overt artifice, learning from the local climate and the human hand, in pursuit of "artifice without artificiality."

On the exterior, vertical louvers and indirect lighting soften the large volume, while the site is wrapped in greenery, as if a corner of the mountain woodland behind Dogo had been cut out and set down here. Like the old "mountain retreat in the city," it aims to bring back a little of the satoyama air of a time when people lived closer to trees and flowers.

Beyond an entrance vestibule narrowed like a tea-room nijiriguchi (its tiny crawl-through entrance) lies a bright lobby that opens onto that garden. A luminous wall of handmade koyori (twisted-fiber) washi paper guides sight lines and movement, and next to it a dark library lounge sinks one step below ground. The two spaces, day and night, light and shadow, illuminate each other.

Taking Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, one of the project's sources of inspiration, as its guide, the second-floor dining room is finished in a deep, dark monotone, from floor and walls to ceiling and furniture, so that only the food and a softly glowing stone garden emerge from the darkness. If the garden outside is a "garden of light and movement," brimming with life, this is a "garden of darkness and stillness," the landscape of mountains and water condensed into a single image.

All 30 guest rooms have their own open-air bath. Deliberately avoiding the showy specialness that announces "a luxury hot-spring hotel," we aimed for rooms where there is hardly anything, yet one somehow feels at home, and paid exacting attention to "invisible performance" such as soundproofing and privacy. On the wall of the post-bath lounge beside the top-floor communal bath, we layered scrap steel sheets with die-cut holes that we happened upon at an ironworks, a motif symbolizing "artifice without artificiality": man-made, yet not intended.

Dogo Miyu has continued to enjoy a top-tier reputation since opening, not only in Dogo and Matsuyama but among hotels across Shikoku, and has maintained a high occupancy rate even through the COVID-19 pandemic. Even after construction, CHIASMA FACTORY has continued, with the client's trust, to be involved in improving both hardware and software and in branding. The project has become one that keeps embodying our belief that architecture is not "finished once it is built," and it continues to do so to this day.