This nursery school for 90 students named “TESORO” (meaning treasure box in Italian) is located in a residential neighborhood in the city of Fukushima.
In order to create an environment in which children can play freely, we proposed consolidating their private road into the site. While maintaining the function as an approach for vehicles on the ground, we could put nursery rooms above the road, thereby securing space for a large, open-air play area in the center of low -story building.
We took on a restoration project for a coffee shop run by two brothers.
The building we were requested to renovate was a rental building which had traditionally been used as a base by a post office etc. for commercial purposes. The building was planned to be dismantled after more than 50 years of serving. In order to make it usable as a shop, reinforcement of pillars including the ones on the tilted second floor was essential. While the pillar reinforcement required the outer wall to be dismantled and repaired, it would put great pressure on the limited budget. Instead, we decided to make use of the big space which was too much for the brothers in the first place and build a new store space without fixing the outer wall. We drew inspiration from an episode that coffee production is agriculture and installed sheets of glass on a wooden frame to build a box-like structure resembling a greenhouse.
The premises are easily accessible and fairly wide, located in a category 1 medium- and high-rise exclusive residential district, and have a busy road, albeit one-way, right in front and tall apartment buildings on both sides. This made it necessary for us to devise a way to achieve the duality of harmonization with the surrounding environment and the owner’s request for a quiet and free home, that is, a house which blocks the line of sight from the outside but is also spacious, and has a strong presence among tall buildings while also blending in with the scenery—we were required to achieve coexistence of conflicting elements (closeness/openness and assertion/harmonization of the house).
Walking into the urbanization control area from the inner city of Fukushima City through Prefectural Road 4, a peaceful rural landscape with a number of long stone-built warehouses come into sight, along with apple and pear farms. The owner’s grandfather also built a magnificent stone warehouse in 1973 and has been taking care of it well ever since.
A significant period in early Japanese history, the Jomon Period was around the 10th Century BC. In this period, people lived a hunter gatherer life in the northeast of Japan, and late Jomon ruins have been excavated in Miyahata, Fukushima Prefecture. There have been many significant finds and studies related to the Jomon people over the past 20 years. To accommodate the research, investigation, exhibition and educational needs of these studies, a museum became necessary. The site is facing some significant Jomon ruins. The context is a beautiful natural landscape. The design has an impressive roof structure with concrete walls and timber roof construction. The structures are expressed in the major internal spaces. In the beginning, the Jomos people lived in caves called grotta. Later the Jamon people came out of caves and made villages of circular-plan houses, still keeping and following the image of caves. To the entrance hall, a covered wooden roof using the imagery of caves was proposed and designed. The structure combines wood panels and wooden beams.
The site is in a forest surrounded by trees, in the back of the site is that parents have housing. There, it was his son build a house. The aim of privacy and good communication with parents and son family. First, it the floated in the air in the building to maintain the existing garden. Building floating in the air is divided into two wings off, placed in the center of the green alleys. The center array, incorporating the natural curves of the surrounding forest, is linked to my parents house.
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