KIRISHIMA GREENSHIP icoia
We designed an environmentally interactive community facility that integrates three functions: a café, a shop, and a botanical garden.
The botanical garden is positioned as an independent glass volume, serving as the symbolic core of the project. It is enveloped by a green hill that rises as if the riverside terrain itself had swelled upward, giving form to an architecture that stands in contrast to the surrounding shochu factory complex as a landscape in its own right.
Through a cross-industry collaboration between Kirishima Shuzo, a leading shochu producer, and Starbucks, a global coffee brand, the project realizes a new crossover between the café experience and environmental engagement.
A new material was developed by combining Shirasu—a unique soil found in southern Kyushu that also functions as a natural filtration system producing Kirishima-Rekkasui*, the base water used in Kirishima shochu—with used coffee grounds from Starbucks. This initiative seeks to extend the cross-industry collaboration beyond operations, reflecting it in the building’s materiality and environmental performance.
* Kirishima-Rekkasui (Kirishima fissure water):
Pristine groundwater naturally filtered over many years as rain falling on the Kirishima mountain range passes through shirasu layers and volcanic ash soil.
