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Westcott House Tea Ceremony House And Japanese Garden




Springfield, Ohio

Design: April 2005 - Ongoing
Construction: -
Site area: 1342.08m²
Building area: 82.02m²
Total floor area: 82.02m²
Structure: Steel reinforced concrete

Design Concept

The Japanese garden for the Westcott House is designed as a stone garden with the theme of Zen. It is designed to be the modernization and abstraction of Japanese traditional garden. The garden will be excavated as an oval-bowl-shape so that the tea house with pilotis is standing above the sunken garden as if it were floating on a pond.
The tea house and the garden will be finished with fair-faced-concrete that shows the grain of its timber mold on its surface. The sunken garden consists of steps of 30cm high on which people can sit down and enjoy watching the garden and tea house. A number of natural rocks will be laid in the garden.

The tea house will be approached via a small bridge.
The tea house consists of a concrete slab of 7.2m×7.2m and a thin roof made of aluminum honeycomb-panels that is supported by 4 circular columns. The 4 transparent glass partition walls are standing on the slab to create a tea ceremony space.

The style of the tea house is called the “Ryu-rei” style that uses benches and tables for tea ceremony. The benches are made of fair-faced-concrete and granite stones. The tables are made of aluminum honeycomb-panels.
The Andon, Japanese style lanterns, will be fixed onto the floor slab around the glass partition walls. There are four thin circular standing columns inside the glass partition walls to symbolize “Tokobashira” that means columns standing by an alcove space, or “Tokonoma”, in a Japanese traditional tea room.
Instead of a “Tokonoma”, a free standing wall is located behind the guests’ seats to create a space for hanging scrolls or pictures and for placing flowers. The electric supply equipment will be provided but water supply equipment will not be provided as water is usually prepared from outside the site for “Nodate”, outdoor Japanese tea ceremony.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House will be the main view in front of the guests in the tea house.