Hotel Il Palazzo

HHotel Il Palazzo stands on the Naka River in Fukuoka, designed by Aldo Rossi and opened in 1989. Its interiors were lost once, then rebuilt by Uchida Design Inc. and reopened in 2023. We read what remained of Rossi’s windowless wall and its axes.

A Front Without Windows

On the bank of the Naka River, in Haruyoshi, Chuo Ward, Fukuoka, stands a wall with no windows. It is the front of Hotel Il Palazzo. Kiyoshi Hasebe, head of Uchida Design Inc., thinks Rossi may have wanted to rule out the vulgarity of gazing at the river in front. The building stands before a river and does not show it. From its very first move, the architecture took that attitude. Across the water lies the Nakasu food-stall district.

The architect was the Italian Aldo Rossi. Shigeru Uchida was responsible for the interiors and art direction, with Ikko Tanaka and others joining. Uchida Design Inc., which took over Uchida’s office, would later carry out the reopening. The hotel opened in 1989 and calls itself Japan’s first design hotel. The then owner approached Uchida, and Uchida in turn invited Rossi to take charge of the basic design, TECTURE MAG writes.

Rossi won the Pritzker Prize in 1990. The Pritzker announcement lists, among his recent completed works, a hotel and restaurant complex in Japan (spelled “11 Palazzo” there).

The interior that guests walk through today, however, is not the one that opened. It was almost entirely lost once. The hotel closed in January 2022 for a redesign by that same studio, and reopened in October 2023.

To a guest, the hotel appears first as a windowless wall. From outside, there is no telling how much of what lies behind it is as it was. Without windows, a guest can only imagine the inside from in front of the wall.

The outer wall stayed standing; the interiors vanished once and were assembled again. After the interiors were lost and reassembled, does what Rossi built in Fukuoka still stand as architecture? This article follows that question.

The Little City Rossi Composed

Rossi was trying to make a small city out of a single building, Hasebe says. Uchida and his partner Mitsuhashi responded by giving the interior the same image as the exterior. Behind the windowless wall lay a town with streets. The regular rhythm of the columns and side windows on the façade was carried inside, and Rossi’s colours of red, blue and green were taken in. The aim was to show the same town to the eye that walks outside and the eye that walks within.

The skeleton resembled the streets of a town. Two alleys ran east–west, and a galleria ran north–south through the centre of the building. The north–south axis was called the “Path of the Sun” or the “Path of the Galleria”, and Rossi is said to have named it.

According to TECTURE MAG, the annex housed four bars: Rossi’s El Dorado, and others by Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce and Shiro Kuramata, while the main building had a disco in the basement. Then, as the bubble economy ended, customers dwindled, the bars closed one after another and the owner changed; in the major refit of 2009, almost all the spaces of the original completion were lost, it says. Uchida Design Inc. had no part in that refit.

Rumi Inagaki of the same studio went back into the closed hotel ahead of the reopening, for the first time in years. It had vanished, she says, “without a trace”. Kuramata’s bar had become a wedding zone, and the axes Uchida and Rossi had made were gone. Yet she also says the experience made her realise again how great the power of interior design is.

Here lies half of the question. A wall may still stand, but if the axes inside are gone, the composition of the little city is lost. Rossi’s architecture seems to have been held up by its interiors.

Set out as a timeline, the path from opening to reopening becomes clear.

The interior a guest walks through is therefore one that has been replaced twice. Which parts are real survivors, and which were redrawn from plans? The next chapter sorts that out.

What Came Back, What Was Moved

According to Inagaki, the work towards reopening began with a skeleton model of just columns and floors, built from the surviving drawings and photographs from the time of completion. Hasebe says that in Japanese, “redesign” comes down to honka-dori.

On the outside, continuity came first. The exterior designed by Rossi was respected and partly restored, TECTURE MAG reports. The façade design has barely changed since the early drawings, Hasebe says. When it was decided to remove one storey, Rossi took scissors to the sheet in front of him and shortened the drawing. When it was visited in November 2023, the sheet itself hung in the studio’s room.

Inside, the two east–west alleys and the north–south galleria were revived. The materials were not simply brought back from the time. The red of karin wood, the green of terrazzo, the blue of steel (terrazzo being a floor material made by setting crushed stone in cement and polishing it): the team extracted the colours of the materials that had been used and deployed them in a subdued tone, says the designer Yukari Okuno. Lattices, colonnades and stripes are also followed at key points, Hasebe says.

Some of the real things were moved. The golden façade at the back centre of the EL DORADO lounge was relocated, as part of the interior, from Rossi’s bar of the same name, and redesigned to suit the ceiling height. In front of it stands “Dancing Water”, an installation Shigeru Uchida made late in his life, its surface always in motion. Water moves in front of the gold, and Rossi’s wall and Uchida’s water share one field of view.

Straight ahead from the lifts stands a bar shelf modelled on Rossi’s façade. It had miraculously survived and was refurbished, Inagaki says. The water basin is said to pay homage to Rossi, who had drawn the Naka River into his early drawings.

Hasebe says: “Even if it is a little dirty, there is meaning in repairing it and relocating the real thing.” Not everything came back, though. According to Shuichi Narikawa, who made the furniture, some pieces were not reproduced, because the original makers had closed or the original materials could not be obtained.

Set side by side in terms of use, the hotel before and after the redesign looks like this.

The changes cluster in the parts that concern use. The flight of stairs that ran straight down from the entrance to the basement gave way, for barrier-free access, to a short approach and a lift, Inagaki says. Guests no longer descend straight from the entrance to the basement. The lighting source also changed from halogen to LED, and Narikawa built mock-ups again and again to check how the light spreads across floor and wall.

What a guest sees from a terrace is part of this too. The clock tower is by Rossi and stands on the annex, which is now let to tenants. TECTURE MAG prints a photograph of a second-floor room with a terrace from which that tower is visible. The floor where reception used to be became a guest-room floor that makes use of its height of about 4 metres.

When you stay, look at the large mirrors in front of the lifts. Rossi’s drawings are printed on them, a different one on each floor. Change floors and compare, and inside the windowless wall you can gather the architect’s lines one sheet at a time.

Inside the wall that does not show the river, a basin recalls it.

Aldo Rossi and the City of Fukuoka

Aldo Rossi was an Italian architect, born in 1931 and died in 1997. He took his architecture degree at the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1959.

His 1966 book, The Architecture of the City, is a work of urban theory that has been translated into seven languages by the year of the prize. The Pritzker jury citation says that from that theoretical base came designs that seem always to be part of the city fabric, rather than an intrusion, and it lists an office complex, a hotel, a cemetery, a floating theatre and even a coffee pot among them.

The Fukuoka hotel is an extension of that. Haruyoshi had long had a poor image, TECTURE MAG reports, and the hotel was conceived in the 1980s as the first step in a project to dispel it. Rossi came to Fukuoka, drank with Uchida in Nakasu, and walked around Haruyoshi. His first proposal was that distinctive façade, Hasebe says. A windowless wall refuses the river; it also looks like a wall that makes a separate territory within the town.

Back to the opening question: does what Rossi built in Fukuoka remain architecture even though the interiors have changed? Taken in layers, the answer splits. The outer wall is, as seen above, the original partly restored with respect. The interior finishes were almost all lost at one point, and today’s interiors are a mixture of reinterpretation redrawn from plans and photographs, and fragments that were relocated, such as the golden façade. And the axes of the alleys and galleria are not finishes but the skeleton of the building. Change the finishes, and as long as the axes return, the composition of the little city returns. What Rossi left in Fukuoka is the outer wall and the axes.

Hasebe, who led the redesign, calls it honka-dori all the same. There is an original poem, and a poem that answers it. Where the original ends is something guests find for themselves, walking the corridors with their own eyes.

Three things to see here

「Inside the wall that does not show the river, a basin recalls it.」

SUMIBIKI Editors

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