ENSHO-AN

Ensho-an (Crystalized Smoke Hermitage) is a small smoking hut added to a corner of the garden at Dogo Miyu, a hot-spring luxury hotel in Dogo district in Matsuyama. Folded like origami from a single sheet of steel, it was conceived to turn a smoking area from a facility that is merely "there because it has to be" into a place that "should be there."

A stone garden of crushed rock and paving that evokes the calm of the Seto Inland Sea, and a grove of mixed trees. Seen from the lobby, this "mountain retreat in the city" already stands as a flawless landscape in its own right. A smoking hut added to it must melt quietly into the scenery while remaining a singular point with the contemporary character that is Dogo Miyu's own.

Smoking spaces are usually walled in and placed apart from the landscape. A smoke taken in such an isolated spot is anything but a relief; it can feel like an act of penance, even laden with a sense of guilt. In a garden, an outdoor space set slightly apart from public routes, we thought it might be possible to free the smoking area from this isolation and create a place that keeps a distance/closeness from the landscape and its surroundings that is comfortable for both.

The answer is this steel origami, born of aiming at the narrow gap between the freedom that a chance flick of the hand produces and cold rationality, between the deliberate and the unintended. Showing nothing of its nearly five tons or of the thought stacked up within it, the object wraps itself softly in the surrounding trees and air like one of the garden's stones that has always been there. It blends into the landscape while giving off a faint, surreal strangeness, and has become a new accent within it.

Sit inside, and the impression differs from the exterior. You feel pleasantly enclosed and secure, yet the hut is wide open, and smoke drifts along the ridge of the gently rising ceiling and is drawn up into the sky. The irregular, window-like opening at the front frames the trees around Ensho-an, and the shadows of their branches sway across the unevenly-painted gray walls. A landscape found only in this place is unmistakably here.

Since completion, guests have reportedly been stepping out into the garden to smoke in visibly greater numbers. Not quite what the times would predict, perhaps, but a result an architect can happily accept.