Hotel Granvia Kyoto

HHotel Granvia Kyoto sits inside Kyoto Station Building in Shimogyo, Kyoto, opened in 1997. The station building was designed by Hiroshi Hara. We read what it means to stay inside a station: a lobby on the 2nd floor and rooms on the 7th to 15th.

The Lobby Is on the Second Floor

Out of the Central Gate of JR Kyoto Station, an escalator stands immediately on the right. Ride it to the 2nd floor and you are in the hotel’s main lobby. Come from the West Gate or the Shinkansen gates instead, and you follow the North–South Free Passage, pass through the Japanese restaurant arcade, and arrive at the same lobby. From gate to lobby, the way stays inside the station building. The first door a guest arriving by train passes is not a guest-room door but a ticket gate.

“Please note that the hotel lobby is on the 2nd floor, not the 1st.” The warning is repeated, once for those arriving by train and once for those arriving by car.

There are other entrances. The main entrance and the porte-cochère are on the 1st floor, and guests in wheelchairs are escorted either from the 1st floor to the lobby on the 2nd, or from the North–South Passage on the station building’s 2nd floor to the hotel entrance on the mezzanine 3rd floor (the hotel’s visitor guidance). The hotel’s entrances are named at three different heights.

The guest rooms run from the 7th floor to the 15th. Below them stack banquet halls, a pool and wedding venues. Between the ticket gate and the room, a guest passes through many floors of a building. The ticket gate and the lobby sit one storey apart. The hotel is stacked vertically.

Hotel Granvia Kyoto sits inside Kyoto Station Building, which opened in 1997: a mixed-use complex of station, department store, theatre, hotel and more. The station is not inside the hotel. The hotel is inside the station building. It was designed by Hiroshi Hara. That the lobby is on the 2nd floor decides how the building has to be read.

The hotel opened in September of the same year. It reached its 29th anniversary in September 2026, and the 30th, in 2027, is named as the next milestone (the operator’s release of August 2026).

So any attempt to talk about this hotel’s architecture spreads to the whole station building. From here on, figures for the whole building and figures for the hotel are kept apart. The lobby floor and the guest-room window are both parts of one large structure, the station building.

You come to see a hotel, and the building turns out to be a station. That mismatch is the question of this article. When you stay inside a station building, where in Hiroshi Hara’s architecture do you actually place yourself?

A Giant Station of Sixty Metres

The hotel offers rooms looking straight out at Nidec Kyoto Tower as “tower-view” rooms, and says that rooms on the upper floors also look at the tower and, far beyond it, the ridge line of the Gozan hills.

Kyoto Tower was designed by Mamoru Yamada and completed in 1964. The interviewer in Hiroshi Hara’s oral history raises it as a tower that was argued over, as ruining the townscape when it was built. Hara takes the memory lightly, saying something like “Kyoto Tower, quite a thing, isn’t it.” From the window of a new station building, you look at the tower that once caused a dispute. The old argument about the landscape carries on there.

Kyoto Station Building began with a design competition. In 1984 the council for the commemoration of the 1,200th anniversary of Heian-kyo designated the station rebuilding as a related project. An international competition was held in 1990, and in 1991 Hara’s scheme was chosen as the best entry. Before that, in 1985, the basic concept for rebuilding Kyoto Station had been decided. The call for schemes went out across borders, to rebuild a single station. That was where the building began.

The architecture site #casa reports that the competition was an unusual one for a Japanese railway station, an international invited competition with seven architects, Hara among them, and that the field was narrowed to the schemes by Hara, Tadao Ando and James Stirling before Hara’s was adopted after discussion. The list of participants is secondary information, which we have not been able to confirm from a primary source.

One of the points at issue was height. In a 2012 oral history, Hara says: “In the end, the scheme I submitted was the lowest.” The interviewer had just suggested that height became a problem because this was Kyoto. He also says that the invited competition came while he was working on the Umeda Sky Building, and that he knew nothing at the time about the opposition movement in Kyoto.

While designing, Hara says, he watched a video of a Rolling Stones concert every night, over and over, and turned down every approach from television and the newspapers. In the nights of designing the station of a thousand-year capital, there was rock-concert footage.

In 1992 the Kyoto Station district was designated a special urban block, which relaxed the height limit (the operator’s chronology). A special urban block is a planning designation that sets, block by block, limits such as floor-area ratio, maximum building height and wall position. Construction began in December 1993. The year after the best scheme was chosen, the way the height was fixed moved.

The building was expected to be used for a long time after repeated discussion of the landscape. As a requirement for a “hundred-year building”, keeping the highest standard of equipment at each renovation is listed (the operator’s presentation to a Kyoto City study group). A giant station building was set down on the premise not of finishing, but of continuing to repair. What a guest sees is not only a finished building but a moment in the life of one that is renovated again and again.

Gate, Valley and the Grid of Heian-kyo

The hotel’s address is written “south of Shiokoji on Karasuma-dori”: a place given by reference to a street, counting south from Shiokoji. The location is stated in the street names of Kyoto’s grid. However vast the building, the address keeps the manners of the grid.

The operator explains the design brief as “Kyoto is a gate to history”. It adopts the jobo system, the grid of Heian-kyo’s streets, and places “gates”, symbols of the entrance to the city, on Karasuma-dori and Muromachi-dori. The central concourse is then treated as a valley, with terraces extending east and west, and the middle is an atrium covered in glass and metal. The aim is an interior that mirrors the sky and an exterior that melts into it. Karasuma-dori and Muromachi-dori: the names of two streets mark where the station building’s gates stand.

According to the record of the contractor, Obayashi, the structure is steel-reinforced concrete below ground and steel above. The steelwork for the car park and department-store section over the San’in Line platforms was assembled away from the platforms and slid into place at night on temporary rails (the slide method). Night work across the whole project totalled some 700,000 hours.

The operator’s account also records the reception: there was a remark that the whole building, wrapped in a box of glass and a metal-like skin, gives the impression of a conventional commercial building. On the other hand, the surface design was valued for echoing the decorative sense of Kyoto’s Rinpa school, and the concourse connecting inside and outside was valued as a bold space. A remark about the exterior, praise for the interior: the building was received as having two faces.

For the guest, this valley and grid appear first as passages, or so it seems. The road to the hotel’s front door is itself an interior passage of the station building. The same is true of the way from the Central Gate and of the way from the West Gate or the Shinkansen gates. Valley and gate are not only words on a drawing; they seem to connect to the routes along which guests pull their bags.

Gates on the streets, a valley through the station.

Hiroshi Hara and the Inn Inside a Station

The sources spell the designer of Kyoto Station Building slightly differently: “architectural designer: Hiroshi Hara” (Kyoto Station Building Development) and “Hiroshi Hara and Atelier Phi Architects” (原廣司、アトリエ, ファイ建築研究所; Obayashi). Hara is named as designer for the architecture of the station building. The inside of the guest rooms cannot, on the materials, be called his design.

Hiroshi Hara was born in 1936 in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. He graduated from the University of Tokyo, completed its doctoral course and taught at its Institute of Industrial Science. His major works include Yamato International, the Tazaki Museum, the Umeda Sky Building and the Sapporo Dome. He died on 3 January 2025.

In the oral history, Hara says that he kept surveying the world’s villages at his laboratory in the Institute of Industrial Science. Hara names Joseph Kosuth and Christo as artists who made works for buildings in Kyoto, Sapporo, Miyagi and elsewhere.

Hara says that the Umeda Sky Building, Kyoto Station Building and the Sapporo Dome each took about six years even at the shortest, from the start of planning to completion. Repeating those three, he says, about twenty years went by. He also says that he felt he lived in a closed world, seeing hardly anyone. The length of time he describes matches the size of the station building.

Now to answer the first question. One answer is the interior passage that leads from the ticket gate to the lobby. The other is the window side of the upper floors of the station building. You pass through the architecture along the passage, and learn its height at the window. Along the passage, the architecture decides which way you walk: out of the gate, to the right, and up. At the window, it becomes something you stop to look at. They are two faces, one in motion and one at rest, of the same architecture.

When you stay, step out in front of the station once after checking in, and look up at the building from outside. The exterior, wrapped in glass and a metallic skin, is what you are sleeping in. Back in the lobby afterwards, it is clear that you are on the inside of that same building.

The next morning, ride the escalator from the lobby down to the 1st floor. You are already at the ticket gate. Kyoto Station is also a place where journeys begin and end, and the hotel’s morning belongs to that. Leaving the lobby, your feet follow the same interior passage as on arrival.

Three things to see here

「The hotel’s exit lies inside the same architecture as the station’s entrance.」

SUMIBIKI Editors

Staying here