Each of these two competitions is a small public facilitiy built in a wide and rich-in-green site. According to a such condition, the theme of the design are how architecture concern the whole site and furthermore to the surrounding environment.
'Kirishima Sclupture Art Hall' is a center facility at 'Sclupture Woods' where open-air scluptures are exhibited and locates in a gently sloping hill. Because the zoning has been already shown, the northern side of the site is a parking lot for the users of this woods and the southern side is a open-air exhibition area, we define this architecture as a gate for the woods.
The gate is a meandering fence made up of arranged 60cm-wide timbers along the contour lines. It devides sclupture-woods and controls a flow of the people from the parking lot. This fence also articulates the site into several areas which are inner spaces, such as entrance hall, gallery, storage, cafe and so on, and exterior spaces, such as pond, flower garden, terrrace and so on, and the fence itself is a land art in the sclupture-woods. The timbers continuously changes its hights and angles corresponding to the inner uses, for instance so as to function as lighting control louvers for the gallery. The volumes including the inner spaces with various structures are independent from the fence and are arranged the same as open-air scluptures.
'Hirata-cho Towncenter' locates at the center of the town where rice fields spread. It was requested to fill the role synthesizing the surrounding public facilities, such as town office, public hall, agricultural cooperative association, elementary school, junior high school, and so forth. We composed this architecture with simple two volumes, because it is a comlex of two different facilities in their characters, welfare center and multimedia center. and they are to be built gradually.
The volume of the welfare center articulates the site into open space and parking lot. The roof slopes at the side of the facing street and becomes an approach to the multimedia center. On the other hand, the volume of the multimedia center floats at a right angle of the former and at the hight of 7.5m, flaming the view of mountains from the open space through pilotis. By this arrangement, we intended to integrate the structure of the town more evidently. We fixed our eyes on the different point each other. That is to say, in the welfare center, the arrangement of small volumes such as houses, facing their entrances to the street, controls a networks of people and articles. In the multimedia center, large volumes such as public facilities make an ambiguous line parallelly with the street through open spaces or parking lots.
In addition, when we see this town in the large-scale map, the 'figure' of residential areas seem to float in the 'ground' of vast rice fields, Perhaps this town has created new lands like eroding rice fields along the main street. Here, this rerlation are reversed, that is we put a lawn squware full of the site on the bald lands where public facilities stands. At the east side of the site, the volumes of high trees, strictly the same form of the neighbour gymnasium and inner swimming pool, are planted and make a landscape with various-structured columns supporting the multimedia center.
In these two competitions, putting volumes on the site controls the characters of areas in the site, the arrangement of architecture, plants and scluptures, surounding circulations, views and so on. That is to say, architecture and landscape edit informations defined as space. The informations are not the one, for instance 'urban context', defined culturally through differences of forms such as typologies but we pay attention to that physical arrangement of volumes make visble informations composing our contemporary cities. Here, architecture edit not only the inner spaces but the informations concerning the site furthermore surrounding circumustances. Contrary, landscape is not only treated at the differences of scale from architecture, such as kinds of plants, geometrical patterns or differences of hights, but also by means of them we fix our eyes on the possibilities of editting informations concerning to architecture and city.
(Written by Akio Yasumori)
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