There’s a coastline on the floor of a concrete room in Tokyo. Or something close to one. Dozens of low metal blocks, some stacked three high, some barely up to your shin, all of them washed in color that won’t sit still. Emerald slides into tomato red on one. Coral into ultramarine on the next. Moriyuki Ochiai Architects calls it Chromatic Symphony of Landscapes, which is a big name for what is, technically, furniture.
Nobody tells you which one is the bench.
The island it came from
The colors started on Sensuijima, a little island in the Seto Inland Sea about a five-minute boat ride from the old port town of Tomonoura. Ochiai worked on the project with Jun Ueda and Chika Nakamura. The island’s name means something like “the island where the immortals got drunk.” Supposedly it was so pretty they couldn’t help themselves.
The rocks are the draw. Goshiki-iwa, the colored rocks, are cliffs of rhyolitic tuff, which is volcanic ash from enormous eruptions around 90 million years ago. They come out banded in different shades, partly because of the minerals inside and partly because of how far the iron has rusted. So, a paint job. Just a very slow one.
The paint came from down the road
Here’s the part we didn’t expect. The coating was done by SIRIUS, a powder coating factory in Fukuyama, Hiroshima, under CYUON, its experimental finishes line. Tomonoura is in Fukuyama. So the factory that painted the island’s portrait is in the same city as the island!
Powder coating is normally the boring finish. Tough, flat, one color. Bike frames, patio chairs, the railing outside your dentist’s office. CYUON does gradients and see-through tints instead, and on these blocks the metal looks like it was scored before the color went on (swirls, fans, crosshatching, little ripples), so the light picks up the marks through the paint. On the tops it looks a lot like sun on shallow water.
How they made each texture, we honestly don’t know. The studio hasn’t said, and photos only tell you so much.
If it reminds you of Chris Wood’s dichroic glass, same here. Hers is coated glass, though. This is paint on metal, which somehow makes it stranger.
No instructions
There are no labels and no assigned seats. You find a block that’s the right height and sit on it. Or stand on it, or lean. The studio’s idea is that people work out their own places to sit, pause and gather, and that the room rearranges itself around whoever shows up.
In Daisuke Shima’s photos, people are barefoot on the tops and pressing their palms flat against the surfaces, like they’re checking whether the metal is warm. We’d want to know too. And yes, we would absolutely take our shoes off!
From across the room
Get close and each block is its own little world. Back up and they stop being separate. The gradients carry across the gaps, more or less, and the whole thing starts to read as one sheet of color cracked into terrain. All that grey concrete around it helps a lot.
It made us think of James Turrell’s rooms, where color starts to feel solid enough to lean on. This one you can actually lean on.
Ochiai keeps coming back to color. In 2024 his studio built a maze for a Tokyo showroom out of discarded paint samples, and earlier this year it wove a tea house out of colored wire mesh. We liked both. This is the one we’d want to spend a lazy afternoon in, though.
Design: Moriyuki Ochiai Architects (Moriyuki Ochiai, Jun Ueda, Chika Nakamura). Client and powder coating: SIRIUS, via CYUON. Construction: SIRIUS and 16build. Lighting: ITL. Photography: Daisuke Shima. Spotted via Inspiration Grid and designboom.
Keep exploring: The Color Issue, where you can browse our whole archive by color, a giant gold coil wedged under the High Line, and The Design That Shaped How We Live.
