Designing
for the Western Sun.

01Twenty minutes by bus from Shonai Airport

I visited Suiden Terrasse, a hotel in the Shonai region of Yamagata Prefecture. My first time there.

A bus runs from Shonai Airport, timed to the flights arriving from Haneda. It does not stop at the hotel itself, but there is a stop along the route called "Science Park", and the hotel is right there when you get off. About twenty minutes' ride.

It was my first visit, and several things there genuinely surprised me. I want to share them.

02Standing in the very middle of the paddies

In one sentence: on all four sides of the building, there are rice paddies. Nothing else.

The architect is Shigeru Ban. The concept is exactly that — it stands in the middle of the paddies, in the very middle.

I went in summer, so every field was rice, and at this time of year they are a deep green. It simply stands inside a beautiful expanse of paddy.

The ground floor holds the garage and some locker space, and the second floor is where almost everything happens. The building is entirely ringed by paddies, filled in on all four sides.

Large openings look out from that second floor everywhere you go, and looking through them you feel completely inside the paddy. The ground beneath you is paddy. The view through the fixed windows is paddy only — one hundred percent paddy. You are staged into the sensation of floating in mid-air inside a rice field.

03A different building in every season

The season I visited was the green one, but from what I have read, the whole thing changes with the season.

Early autumn, when the ears turn gold. Harvest time. The landscape goes completely golden. Then once the harvest is done and there is nothing but flooded paddy, the water reflects the sky and the building appears to float on it — apparently something like the Salar de Uyuni. And from there it turns to winter.

That was my first impression: this is a building that lets you feel the four seasons.

04Designing for the western sun

This was my biggest takeaway: we treat southern light as a given in design, and we have never really thought about the western sun.

In the morning, the rooms look out onto shining green fields and fill with sunrise light. You wake up well.

I arrived in the evening, and the western light at that hour was extraordinarily beautiful. Genuinely dramatic — moving, even. I think the western sun is wonderful.

Think of the walk home. The sunset makes you a little lonely and, at the same time, a little warm. Something nostalgic, an old feeling, with loneliness folded into it. Call it melancholy — you know the feeling.

Because Suiden Terrasse is ringed by paddies and opened up with large glazing, a long terrace under a great roof runs out toward the western sun.

Step onto that terrace and you can watch the sun go all the way down, into the fields. The view from that terrace was almost too good.

And you do not even have to go outside. The western light reaches deep into the lobby, and the red of the sky falls into the room itself. It was beautiful.

I wonder whether the western sun is simply disliked by default.
How you look at it, how you let it fall as shadow, how you bring it into the house.

If it only ever registers as "the west sun is hot," then you keep it out. But how the sunset feels when you step outside — that instinctive response is something you can control, and I felt that strongly. The western sun can make a wonderful room.

The sun rises, the south face floods, the living room is lit. That is ordinary design. But after that — how you receive the sun falling to the west. Standing in that space, it hit me hard that this too is a genuinely interesting architectural question. It was the biggest realisation of the trip.

05"Stand here" is built into the plan

And throughout, the design pulls your eye to particular places. There are guides that say "the photo spot starts here." Stand here, stand here — several of them.

The views from those points were, as expected, superb. You could clearly feel it was aimed for.

06The difficulty of building on farmland

Building in the middle of a paddy is a fascinating idea. Practically speaking, though, putting a house on agricultural land is a real hurdle.

In this case, it seems the paddy was converted to residential land first, and only then was the building put up. So dropping a house into the middle of working farmland is, in a sense, difficult.

One way to borrow the idea: if you are lucky enough to build in the countryside, on a site like that, think about how you use a second-floor living room. Give the second floor openings on all four sides. That alone changes the view and changes the eye line. It made me think that being genuinely "surrounded by it" is achievable — and that was the part that moved me.

07Why this town, and why this building

This is a story about sequence: the research institute was attracted first, and the place to stay was built afterwards.

Shonai, the town where Suiden Terrasse stands, apparently had little in the way of tourism resources and had declined considerably, losing population.

The response was to attract, first, Keio University's Institute for Advanced Biosciences, and to build "Tsuruoka Science Park" around it.

Then, next to it, accommodation. Something like a university town, research centre included. I was told the facility was built to draw leading researchers and academics from abroad, along with press and others.

Daisuke Yamanaka, who started this, is himself a graduate of Keio's Faculty of Environment and Information Studies. The institute is Keio's too. The university connection continues not only as an institution but through the people, and I suspect that is what determines how this town moves.

Either way, a university-anchored effort to attract companies produced return migration, produced jobs, and this place has become the seed for further business. It keeps spreading.

The town felt genuinely alive. Even during my visit there were foreign press, media people and government officials around. You could feel it was a serious operation.

Regional revitalisation, rural problem-solving, population decline, ageing, depopulation. It taught me that there are many possible approaches.

08A place you may enter without staying

It functions as a community space. You do not have to be a guest to eat there — lunch or dinner is fine. There is a lounge, so you can come to work or to read. It seems to be used as a local community facility.

Something between public and private — a form of industry-academia partnership, really. Which makes the presence of jobs for students at the leading edge of research interesting in itself, and shows how much can grow from it. Very instructive.

There is water everywhere, not only in the architecture. There was an open-air bath, and the view from it was pure paddy, completely open. Morning and night are both probably wonderful. So is the sunset. It really is a place with a different face across all 365 days and 24 hours.

Rates are also surprisingly reasonable — I believe you can stay from around ten thousand yen. So there seem to be plenty of business travellers, and there is a fitness room and a coin laundry. I suspect a fair number of people stay thirty days, or two months, workation-style, and that strikes me as a very interesting way to use it.

Thirty days here, or one or two months, and I imagine real ideas would come. A lovely place to hold that kind of state of mind while working remotely.

09There is more to see nearby

There are other things to do close by.

Kids Dome Sorai, a full-day facility that works with children. Crafts, printers, that kind of hands-on experience.

And Kamo Aquarium, said to hold the world's largest jellyfish display. I have not been yet — I am thinking of going tomorrow.

There are also spots with beautiful sunsets, and islands. Hakusan Island, for instance, which you can walk around. Plenty to enjoy, so if you are thinking of going, I would recommend it.

Suiden Terrasse was a great deal of fun. And it gave me something to take home.