Shi-An: Portable Tea House
Shi-An origami tea room
JAPAN
Architectural designers enthuse about the movable origami Japanese tea house created by Kazuya Katagari. Named Shi-An, it is 2 meters tall and 2 meters in diameter (7 feet by 7) and made entirely of 4,000 pieces of paper, using origami techniques.
They are folded so that they slot together without any glue, staples, cutting, or scotch tape. It’s sturdy, movable, and very beautiful. The tea house is not a gimmicky decoration.
It was designed as a temporary and mobile exhibition piece, for Ni-Jo Castle in Kyoto, a UNESCO World Heritage site. It has been awarded several prizes including first prize for a Rethinking the Future competition.
Kazuya Katagari’s interest is in unconventional materials and geometric forms. He chose the tea house for his initial design because it “embodies the ideal of Japanese simplified beauties.” He and his colleagues are scaling up the size of the “cellular bodies of structure.”
For the tea lover, this paper house is a reminder of just how refined and exquisite the Japanese tradition is: ceremony, preparation and service, equipment, rituals and of course the tea. Who knows?
Maybe, you’ll see an origami tea house at Epcot Center, in a corner of a really fine hotel that now serves high tea with all its pastries and carbs. The style of simplified beauties calls out for Uji region sencha, Gyokuru, stone-ground matcha and maybe a shincha.