Renovation4 Handa Red Brick Building
The Kabuto Beer brewery was designed in 1898 by Yorinaka Tsumaki, one of the three masters of Meiji architecture. The Handa Red Brick Building is a historic property that the city of Handa chose to preserve in 1996 in order to utilize it as a municipal asset. We approached this renovation proposal from a city planning standpoint.
The elaborate brick and half-timber structure of this building was the best technology of the time, but for a 100-plus year old building to accommodate a large number of visitors, it was essential that it be reinforced against earthquakes. To maintain the exterior, the designers adopted an earthquake-resistant technique called the reinforcing bar insertion method. A total of 8,000 meters of reinforcing steel bars were inserted into the brick walls, an unprecedented large-scale maneuver.
The renovated building keeps historic features like five-layered compound walls, a heat insulation technique used in an era when air conditioning was not available, and has become a symbol of the city as an industrial heritage site.
WORK PAGE Handa Red Brick Building, Conversion
<Renovation>
1 From “scrap & build” to “stock & renovate”
2 Passing on 40 years of knowledge to the design and renovation of the future
3 Renovation plan in the Covid-era to protect what is most important