Kamikatz public house is a brewery built entirely from recycled materials. Here is the project by the studio Hiroshi Nakamura & Nap in Kamikatsu, a small town in Japan.
Born as a private initiative — a craft brewery with an attached pub-restaurant — Kamikatz public house by the architecture studio Hiroshi Nakamura & Nap is located in Kamikatsu, a small Japanese town known for its particularly environmentally conscious residents. The distinctive feature of this building is that every element that makes up the structure comes from recycling processes.
The building was constructed using timber planks sourced from local construction sites, as well as the imposing main glazed facade, which spans an entire elevation and employs a reuse system drawing on the many old window frames salvaged from abandoned houses. But that is not all: the interior furnishings were designed with the same philosophy, so it is possible to find, for example, chandeliers assembled from empty bottles, old stools reinvented as shelves, and wallpaper made from old newspapers. Even the main facade was clad in panels of local wood, suitably reinforced and coloured with an eco-friendly dye extracted from persimmons. The light fittings and all electrical supports were obtained by recovering plastic material, while the flooring comes entirely from recycled material.
"Kamikatz public house is a small, low-cost architecture project that embraces the great dream of helping to create a sustainable social system," explains Hiroshi Nakamura, founder of the Tokyo studio Nap architects. Thanks precisely to the innovative pairing of waste and creativity, Kamikatz public house has not only become a collective symbol for the community of Kamikatsu but has also been judged an exemplary project, winning the Wan sustainable buildings award 2016, an international prize that selects architecture projects focused on reducing energy consumption, using sustainable materials and minimising the environmental impact of buildings.
With this innovative project, architect Nakamura's aim is to demonstrate how relatively simple and inexpensive it is to build a zero-impact home, and he chose to build it in Kamikatsu precisely because of the ecological spirit that pervades the town. Residents here are particularly mindful of the environment: with a waste sorting system divided into as many as 34 categories of materials, they have already achieved an 80 per cent recycling rate — here, old or broken objects are not thrown away but repaired and resold.
Eco-sustainable architecture is becoming a genuine global trend, and strategies for using reclaimed materials in the construction of buildings are growing ever more sophisticated. The project by Hiroshi Nakamura & Nap seems to point the way towards an increasingly green architecture and could become an example for designers around the world.