NISHIGAWA TERRACE
Okayama, Japan
A three-storey food building of January 2025 on the Nishigawa canal in central Okayama, six tenancies, five of them food, stacked around a rain-fed terrarium of planted terraces. The frame is Okayama-grown hinoki cypress, 150 millimetre timbers glued into large members that a small regional sawmill can produce without a big production line, with ordinary post-and-beam framing crosswise so local house carpenters could build it. The only steel in the structure is the stair in this picture, and the single-pitch roof falls south so light still reaches the garden of the house next door.
The building runs on loops: stored rainwater rises from a circular basin, is cleaned through a biotope and a filter of crushed roof tiles, then is pumped up and drip-fed to an edible roof garden of herbs and fruit trees, while worms compost the restaurants' vegetable scraps. The landscape is supervised by permaculture designer Shinji Yotsui of Soil Design, and the night lighting is by lim lighting design. In 2025 the building took the Prime Minister's Award in Japan's national timber use competition, and a Wood Design Award.
Kazuhiro Takeshita Architects
The Okayama practice of Kazuhiro Takeshita, a first-class registered architect born in Kurashiki in 1977, who founded the office in 2009 after eight years at an Okayama architecture firm. The practice deliberately keeps its field wide, moving between uses and scales, and on this building it also designed three of the tenancies inside.
Design and supervision @kazuta.arch. Structural design @ykinoshita0111. Construction Minamoto Kenchiku Koubou (@minamoto_kenchikukoubou). Landscape @yotsuishinji_permaculture.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.