[Text from Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates]
This hair salon is one of the few occasions for me to design an interior, though I have designed a large collection of houses or buildings as an architect. So I reconsidered the idea of ‘finish’.
Architecture is generally composed of the ‘building frame’ and ‘finishing’. On the other hand, it is possible to say that civil engineering is the ‘building frame’ itself, and the interior is very much the ‘finish’. However, once I focused on a part in between them, the ‘partitioning wall’ left something unexplored despite being very familiar to us. Then I took ‘the interior’ to be as‘architecture without a building frame’. From this point of view, ‘partitioning wall’ could be seen as ‘skin’ without ‘skeleton’, or in other words, ‘bone structure’.
We made the ‘partitioning wall’ of this hair salon of very thin ‘black steel’, with a thickness of only 2.3mm so that it swings/rocks softly if you push it. I would like to view the idea as aesthetic interior’. That is, if ‘aesthetic concrete’ appears as a consequence of removing ‘finish’ from a concrete frame, then ‘finish’ without a frame could be ‘aesthetic interior’. Equally, It might be described as a ‘genuine interior’.
Also, to invite the customers comfortably into the interior, the design was required to involve grace and elasticity reminiscent of ‘Baroque’. The interior is a part of the façade as well as an instep with the townscape. So the ‘black steel’ has a scratched pattern like brick tiles as if the brick exterior wall is extended. Actually this kitsch surface has emphasized the peculiar fishy/dull glitter of ‘black steel, whilethe light 2.3mm thickness has softened the steel’s hard image. Additionally ‘resilience’, like a bulldog clip, has been evoked by alternating folded squared edges and elastic curved surfaces on a 36m steel sheet.
title：elastico
location：Nishinomiya-City, Hyogo
principal use：salon
Architects：Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates
Principal in Charge：Katsuhiro Miyamoto
Project Team：Dai Harayama
General Contractor：Yamamoto
Total floor area：83.5㎡
completion date：November, 2010
Website: www.kmaa.jp
