Project Name: Teshima Factory

Location: Teshima Island, Kagawa, Japan

Design Team: Jo Nagasaka / Schemata Architects

Floor Area: 364.8 m²

Completion: April 2025

Photography: Kenta Hasegawa

Design Features: Japanese architect Jo Nagasaka of Schemata Architects has transformed a disused ironworks on the island of Teshima, in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, into a working cafeteria and food production facility that honours both the industrial memory of the building and the ecological identity of its island setting.

Named Teshima Factory, the project was commissioned by entertainment company Amuse as the opening move in a broader agricultural tourism initiative aimed at reviving the island's centuries-old tradition of pesticide-free terraced rice farming. Teshima was once stigmatised as "Garbage Island" following a major illegal dumping scandal, and the project carries with it a quiet ambition to rewrite that narrative through food, craft, and community.

The 364.8-square-metre former ironworks is divided into two distinct halves. One side operates as a brewery, retaining the existing slate roof to control light and preserve its industrial character. The other has been converted into a dining space under corrugated polycarbonate panels that flood the interior with natural light. The two volumes, mirror images of one another, are oriented around the building's original large symmetrical entrance, which Nagasaka identified as the defining spatial feature of the structure and made the organisational axis of the entire design.

This decision to centre the project on an existing architectural condition rather than override it gives Teshima Factory much of its quiet confidence. Inside, the warm tones of the exposed steel frame set the palette for all furniture and joinery. Spherical pendant lights incorporate marine plastic waste collected from surrounding waters, recasting environmental damage as material. Chairs were collaboratively produced by Dutch artist Sander Wassink alongside local islanders, embedding social process directly into the fabric of the space.

The result is a building that does not impose but instead listens, and in doing so, becomes genuinely of its place.

Design Team: Founded in 1998 by Jo Nagasaka immediately following his graduation from Tokyo University of the Arts, Schemata Architects has established itself over the past two and a half decades as one of Japan's most formally rigorous and conceptually distinct design practices. Operating from its studio in Kitasando, Tokyo, the firm works across a deliberately broad disciplinary range, encompassing architectural design, interior design, and furniture design, with a portfolio that spans residential, commercial, hospitality, and public programmes.

Under Nagasaka's continued leadership as principal, the practice has developed a coherent design philosophy grounded in the critical re-examination of existing conditions. Concepts such as subtraction, misuse, half-architecture, and invisible development have positioned Schemata as a practice that resists superficial novelty in favour of a deeper interrogation of material, scale, and spatial experience. A sustained attention to the 1:1 relationship between design intention and built reality runs consistently across projects regardless of programme or scale.

The firm's completed works include commissions for internationally recognised clients including Blue Bottle Coffee, Aesop, HAY, and Descente Blanc, alongside institutional projects such as Musashino Art University Building No. 16, demonstrating a capacity to operate with equal conviction across commercial and civic contexts.