The Ribbon Chapel at the Bella Vista Sakaigahama resort in Onomichi, Hiroshima has been named by ArchDaily, a leading architectural website, as its most popular project of the year.
The visually and structurally stunning wedding chapel, designed by NAP Architects, was actually completed in 2013 and has won numerous prizes including: The Japan Commercial Environmental Design Association’s 2014 JCD Design Grand Prize, the Wallpaper * Design Awards Best Chapel of 2015, the Japan Structural Designers Club Design Prize (2015), and was the LEAF AWARDS 2015 Overall Winner.
The resort hotel enjoys picturesque views of the Seto Inland Sea but the chapel site was surrounded by 10-meter (33 feet) high trees and did not allow for ocean views.
The architects extended the chapel’s form higher than the tree level to obtain an observation platform with ocean views at the top and to provide a high ceiling for the chapel chamber itself.
As the architect writes: “By entwining two spiral stairways, we realized a free-standing building of unprecedented composition and architecturally embodied the act of marriage in a pure form.” The two spirals seamlessly connect at their 15.4m (50.5 feet) summit to form a single ribbon.
“The chapel is configured as a double spiral formed by two stairways. Starting from different locations, the stairways slowly spiral upward to become one—a device symbolic of the bride and groom’s path of marriage and formal union as one. In fact, it is conjectured the bride and groom will actually ascend the separate spiral stairways to meet at the top, embrace, and receive the blessings of those in attendance watching from the garden.”
The wedding guests are seated in the chapel chamber at the center of the structure.
The building’s exterior is finished in upright white-painted wood panels and titanium zinc alloy, a material resistant to damage from the sea breeze and pliable enough to be bent to the structure’s curvature.
The building also employs a number of structural devices to ensure stability and safety, including a pendulum-type base isolation device and tuned mass damper (TMD) to control vibration.
The structural engineers also foresaw that upon removal of the supporting falsework the building would undergo rotational sedimentation under its own weight, which might cause the intermediate supporting posts to lean inward. Ikuhide Shibata of Arup dealt with this issue by developing a structural model which applied the same amount of reverse torque as the pre-determined natural rotational force. Hiroshi Nakmura explains that: “As a result, the posts, deliberately leaned for construction, became vertical after the completion of construction and stayed within a 2/1,000 margin of error between floors.”
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