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Architects: Kei Kaihoh Architects
- Area: 356 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Soichiro Suizu
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Manufacturers: Staco, Stucoflex
Text description provided by the architects. This is a wooden snow storage built in a small town called Yasuzuka in Joetsu City, Niigata Prefecture. The snow storage is a natural refrigerator that utilizes the cold heat of the snow, and this time, rice harvested in the neighborhood will be stored. In addition to the aging of farmers and the lack of successors, farmers in terraced rice paddies in mountainous areas generally have less productivity than farmers on the plain and tend to have lower incomes. The client Joetsu City aims to improve this situation.
Since the humidity inside the snow storage is always high and the building may be damaged by snow pressure, reinforced concrete construction is usually chosen, but this time, as a wooden structure, the aim was to rethink the sustainable relationship between the local forestry industry and snow. If inexpensive snow storage can be realized, farmers will be able to build snow storage easily, whether newly constructed or renovated, and this will increase the momentum for snow utilization rather than snow removal and snow conquering and promote the use of snow energy. Snow storage is a building that must be closed to the outside due to its performance.
This time, a semi-outdoor corridor was built around the perimeter of the snow storage so that visitors can feel the charm of its surroundings. For example, a portion of the exterior wall is watermarked to allow visitors to hear the sound of the Oguro River and birdsong in an area that is used as a snow disposal site in the winter. For the residents, openings were placed to capture the scenery of their daily lives in an impressive manner. The aim was to create a place where farmers can take pride in farming in a snow country.
The exterior walls of the corridor are double-skinned to reduce environmental impact by preventing solar radiation from reaching the insulated walls surrounding the snow storage, while at the same time serving as a winter snow fence. The long pillars of the corridor are divided by auxiliary beams to form braided pillars, and the span and top height required for the snow storage were secured by conventional construction methods using small-diameter local cedar timbers instead of large-section laminated timbers.
"Circulation" with various scales and characteristics such as snow, people, rice, trees, wind, heat, etc. overlap. The overlapping landscape is shaped into a building called a snow storage by complementing some of these circulations or finding better points of contact with these circulations.
