Fujita Coffee

In a lively city where people’s activities and daily lives often intersect, we sought for an architecture that pulls people in and inspires them. Located in Higashi Osaka, a city of dense low-rise construction, the project sits adjacent to an elevated railroad track that was once a freight line. We created a plan centered around industrial-grade coffee roasting machinery, embracing the chaos of city life into one rising spiral.
Serving as a production site, a square core hosts industrial coffee machinery, a full-scale bakery workshop and a café counter. Customers, employees, and those who live and work in the surrounding area all gather to the core and rise around it. The building is transparent, which serves to visualize the core and slopes around it, manifesting the functions and flows of people. Passerbys are immediately drawn into the spiral architecture.
From the beginning, the founder intended to set up a new business consisting of a high-class bread workshop and café, seeking to reside at the top in secret. He requested an engaging spectacle around the production services that suits Instagram’s topic. The idea of how to create the architecture is simply that the core serves as production, with human flow surrounding it. Instead of articulating a specific shape, I was more conscious of the events that would appear.
To establish such a flow, floor-to-ceiling heights were set along building core and slope standards. With the slope fully supported by the core’s cantilever, the width and gradient could be freely adjusted to whatever function it meets.
Along with flows of people, environmental flows are taken to equal consideration. The sun’s rays that enter through the glass act to heat the floor and volume of the sloped space, crating an updraft. Cool temperatures from underground rise vigorously through the atrium gaps of the core and building circulation. Air is exhausted through both the ventilation windows and operable windows at the top of the core. We are always creating a mechanism to create circulation between the building and outside environment. Instead of sunlight overheating the inside environment, it is properly circulated as an engine that promotes natural ventilation. In winter, the southside of the slope becomes a sunroom as the solar altitude reaches through the building façade. When the ventilation window is opened, the air is warmed to the extent that a mirage dances on the window.
The slope floor material was very cheap, just structural plywood put on the steel deck plate, but oil stain was applied on it. We painted on the sloped floor as if it were a canvas, acting as a whirlpool of rising diversity. The painted floor surface serves to engage the spiral flow.
All functions are exposed and visualized. Each function appears as a lively and rich unified body. People are attracted to where they can feel meaningful and free. We created a “Naked Spiral around Function”, an architecture of flow where everything gathers from the surrounding area and swirls and flies as it is.