Stone chamber

Niijima Island in the Izu Islands is the only place in the world where fireproof stone with unique properties is mined.

However, fireproof stone buildings are disappearing at a rate of more than a dozen per year, and preservation efforts are not keeping up.

He moved to Niijima as a designer, researched the remaining pit-fire stone buildings on the island, and came up with a plan to build a small pit-fire stone hut on an experimental basis.

It is a material that has great potential not only as a building material, but also as a design material, with its workability allowing it to be cut with a saw, its flexibility and insulating properties like a sponge containing air bubbles, its corrosion resistance that is unaffected by sea breezes, its rough surface which gives it excellent adhesion to cement, and its high silicon content which causes the surface to turn into glass when heated at high temperatures.

Feeling a crisis about the current situation in which such rare and valuable building materials are being discarded as garbage on Niijima, he has formed a local team and is making progress little by little, handling the materials with his own hands and borrowing the wisdom of his predecessors.

In this area, where the anti-fire stone culture is on the verge of collapse, we salvage stones that are considered waste materials, pondering the significance of giving them various possibilities and aspects, and incorporating them into our architecture.