CHERRY BLOSSON’ Palace

There are moments of informal formalism, of relocation, of renunciation of dialogue with the context, which is not even taken into account to contradict it: it is simply ignored. That is a time without place. However, the landscape should not grow by mere undifferentiated accumulation of volumes and built surfaces but should do so through the meaningful aggregation of places, that is, of sites with character.

We imagine the cherry blossom festival in the sense that it has for the Japanese tradition, as a holiday abroad, a ritual of contact with nature at its most delicate moment and as a metaphor of ephemeral existence, since the cherry blossoms remain in bloom for only one or two weeks a year.

For us, the celebration is more like a picnic under the flowers, a position from which we can contemplate their delicate lightness. Hence the project's effort to preserve the land as intact as possible. The focus of our intentions is to consolidate its pre-existing structure, support it and consolidate it to ensure its permanence over time.

The position of the building is key in the project's approach and the invasion of the landscape has been avoided with a built volume that exceeds the scale of the existing. It is located at the meeting of the road with the road cut, at the edge of the property, in such a way that it is the same retaining wall of the land that when folding generates the two largest rooms, at road level the auditorium, on the middle floor the multipurpose room and offices; all this develops a height that keeps it hidden from an upper position in the lot; It is crowned with a cafeteria-restaurant that emerges above the ground with the scale of the buildings that already occupy the landscape.