SUIDEN TERRASSE

SSUIDEN TERRASSE stands as if afloat on the rice fields of Tsuruoka, Yamagata. Designed by Shigeru Ban and opened in 2018, its courtyards use tiles from houses that collapsed in the Kumamoto earthquake. What did the architecture give up, and what did it bring in, to keep the paddies?

The Courtyard Tiles Came from the Kumamoto Earthquake

The courtyards of SUIDEN TERRASSE are laid with roof tiles. They come from houses that collapsed in the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, and the design differs from one courtyard to the next.

A roof tile normally keeps the rain off from above. Used as courtyard design, it looks different: part of a former roof now decorates the hotel’s courtyard.

Why would tiles from a disaster area in Kyushu end up in the middle of the rice fields of Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture? Disposing of disaster waste was a serious problem in the stricken area. Using the tiles in the courtyards was meant as a small help with that, and the hotel’s website credits the idea to the architect, Shigeru Ban.

The hotel stands as if floating on the rice fields of the Shonai Plain. It has three guest wings, named after the three sacred mountains of Dewa: Hagurosan, Gassan and Yudonosan. Ban won the Pritzker Prize in 2014. The hotel opened in 2018.

To welcome a roof from another place without spoiling the view of the paddies: the thinking behind this building shows clearly in the courtyard tiles.

To keep the rice fields, what did the architecture give up, and what did it bring in? That is the question of this article.

Rice Fields Saved from Reclamation

The rice fields on this site had originally been slated for reclamation (Shigeru Ban Architects’ project page). Ban chose to keep them and made them the theme of the design. Keeping the fields decided from the start where, and how, the buildings would sit.

Daisuke Yamanaka, who developed the hotel, was moved by the view of the rice fields when he landed at Shonai Airport for work. He wanted many people to see it. He came from Mitsui Fudosan and moved to Shonai in 2014 (May 2018 release). He visited local companies carrying Ban’s drawings of the finished building. These details come from a TV Tokyo interview article.

The opening came in stages. The pre-opening was on 1 August 2018 (release on PR TIMES). The release reprinted by Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun gives 19 September as the date of the grand opening.

In the May 2018 release ahead of the pre-opening, Yamanaka, then head of Yamagata Design, wrote that the hotel should be a place that ‘we who live in Shonai would actually want to invite our families, friends and guests to’, and said the company aimed to build such a facility. Not a building only for tourists, but a place where locals want to bring their guests. That yardstick points the same way as the decision to keep the fields.

How to keep the beautiful rice-field landscape, and how to insert architecture into it gently. – what Ban valued most in the design, as presented on the hotel’s website

Shonai is also a land of rice. The Shonai Plain was formed from a former lagoon. The three sacred mountains of Dewa have drawn worshippers for more than 1,400 years (Tsuruoka City booklet). In December 2014 Tsuruoka was designated a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy. The rice field is a landscape, and also the foundation of this land’s food and faith.

The paths between the fields are open for walks. Near the spa, though, guests are asked not to go inside the area marked by security stickers, where an alarm sounds. The field is not only a view to look at. The rice is grown in two different ways, and the Suiden Calendar lets guests compare them. The hotel has also begun trying rice-growing without flooding the paddies. Its care for the fields runs from landscape management and environmental protection to supplying rice and offering farming experiences, and there is a scheme in which guests try rice-growing in a contract farmer’s field and have the autumn harvest sent to their homes. The concept is ‘a hotel floating in the rice fields where you spend the time of fine-weather farming and rainy-day reading’, and it is designed so that you sense the paddies wherever you are (hotel website).

Beyond the shelves of the common building, paddies stretch to the horizon. Its books are arranged under ten themes, and as of 24 October 2026 it is open to people who are not staying. The library in the guest wings, under seven themes, is for guests only. The collection of about 2,000 volumes was selected under the supervision of the book director Yoshitaka Haba and is split evenly between the two. The hotel describes the stay in six words: space, books, food, farming, community and healing. The food uses ingredients from Shonai and vegetables from the hotel’s own farm, served in an all-day restaurant that looks out to Gassan. Shonai has 17 sake breweries (hotel website), and guests staying at the hotel have their own sake bar and lounge in which to enjoy that sake. Next door is an all-weather children’s education facility. Architecture is not the only lead; rice fields, food and books are set side by side with equal weight.

The number of rooms fell from 143 at opening after the 2020 renovation, because connecting rooms and family rooms were added (TECTURE MAG). Fewer rooms, linked rooms: the hotel reorganised its rooms around how guests use them. As of 24 October 2026 it has 119 rooms (official site).

That is the first half of the answer. The architecture gave up covering the site with one flat footprint. It scattered timber buildings divided by function through the fields and kept the guest rooms in low, two-storey groups (Shigeru Ban Architects’ project page). So what did it add in place of that ground? The next chapter looks at structure and materials.

Built in Timber, Lifted off the Ground

Of the three buildings, the common building stands in the middle (Shigeru Ban Architects’ project page). Its ground floor is a reinforced-concrete piloti level, so the floor is lifted clear of the earth and the whole building seems to float. Pilotis are the columns that hold a floor up with no walls beneath it.

Above, an RC core and slender steel columns carry load-bearing walls of LVL, thin layers of wood glued together, which in turn support a laminated-timber roof. Everything except the foundation and core sections is timber (hotel website). The core is the reinforced-concrete spine at the centre of the building.

The roof of the second-floor common area is a folded-plate structure. Assembling the roof like bellows adds strength, so the purlins and roof beams that conventional construction needs are not required (hotel website). The result is a large space with as few columns as possible.

The large windows carry diagonal timber bracing. The bracing helps the building withstand earthquakes, and as time passes it changes the look of the light coming through the glass. It is also one of the key design features of the common area.

Where are the mountains the wings are named for? From the restaurant terrace the Gassan range fills the view ahead, with Kinpozan (459 m) and Hogariyama (751 m) to the right (hotel FAQ). The FAQ places the Three Mountains of Dewa with Gassan straight ahead, Hagurosan to the left and Yudonosan to the right, further back.

If you stay, settle on an order. Check-in starts at 3.30 p.m. Go round the courtyard tiles while there is daylight, and in the evening take a library book to your room. Books may be read in the room but not taken out of the hotel, and about three at a time is the guideline. Check-out is at 10 a.m., after which the spa building and the G-wing library are closed to you.

Water gets the same care. In contrast to the long common and guest wings, the spa is two circular buildings set as if floating on the fields, a work of 2021 (Shigeru Ban Architects’ project page). The roof of the first-phase building is a timber dome made of laminated timber laid horizontally in hexagons and triangles. It is carried by a Vierendeel truss, in which upper and lower chords are joined by timber posts. The second-phase building encloses a broad water surface with a timber fence, and the surface of its open-air bath sits at nearly the same height as that water. Here too, timber rather than steel makes the large space.

The water is natural hot spring from the Tsuruoka Kitakyoden source, and there are three baths, named for colour. Amairo no Yu, ‘sky blue’, has vivid blue tiles on its walls and, in its open-air bath, a gap between tub and ceiling that frames the mountains and sky; Tokiiro no Yu, ‘crested-ibis pink’, is ringed with soft pink tiles; and Geppaku no Yu, ‘moon white’, has white walls and is lit by moonlight at night. The hexagonal ceiling of Tokiiro no Yu is timber-framed, and its skylight lets in daylight by day and stars by night.

Shigeru Ban and Architecture for Disaster Areas

Shigeru Ban was born in Tokyo in 1957. He founded his own office in 1985 and from 1995 was a consultant to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In the same year he also set up a disaster-relief group, the Voluntary Architects’ Network. His main works include the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Mount Fuji World Heritage Centre in Shizuoka, the Oita Prefectural Art Museum and La Seine Musicale. His honours include the Académie d’Architecture Gold Medal (2004), the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize (2009) and the Medal with Purple Ribbon (2017).

The material that symbolises Ban’s architecture is the paper tube. It has served as paper-tube shelters in evacuation centres and been used actively in disaster relief. At this hotel it appears throughout the common areas and guest rooms: chairs, table legs, partitions and bedheads.

In April 2021 saunas were added to the spa. The men’s sauna is hexagonal and the women’s has a bench reminiscent of paper tubes (design magazine AXIS). In the sauna of Geppaku no Yu the bench imitates a paper tube, with a pool of water outside the window. In Amairo no Yu the wooden ceiling, skylight, chairs and cold plunge are all hexagonal. Both are Finnish-style saunas with self-service löyly; the sauna rooms measure 10.5 m² (Amairo) and 8.46 m² (Geppaku), each for six people. The paper tube, a signature of Ban’s architecture, has found its way into the sauna.

Paper tubes and tiles have something in common: both were present at disaster sites. The hotel’s interior carries the work of those sites to within a guest’s reach.

Back to the opening question. To keep the rice fields, the architecture gave up covering the ground widely. And it brought in materials and ideas born from disasters in other places.

Three things to see here

「Tiles from the Kumamoto earthquake now decorate a courtyard among the rice fields of Yamagata.」

SUMIBIKI Editors

Staying here