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Architects: Atelier and | Tatsuo IWAOKA Laboratory, MORIIS Atelier, Ouvi
- Area: 495 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Shinjiro Yamada
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Manufacturers: Bentley, Fujiwara Chemical, Woodone, galvalume steel plate
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Lead Architects: Tatsuo Iwaoka, Masaki Mori
Text description provided by the architects. Simultaneously, exposed and concealed architecture creates a new interaction with the surrounding environment. This project involved housing relocation and reconstruction for a clinic and road expansion work adjacent to the south side of Matsumoto Castle Park in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. The new site was provided by the government and partially overlapped with the previous site as the line of view to Matsumoto Castle. This allowed it to retain the picturesque scenery of the castle and an old house's garden. The site surroundings are expected to be redeveloped as the center of what was formerly a castle town to cultivate an independent cultural area. The area is also referred to as the Sannomaru Area, which is located between the castle's outer moat and the Metoba River.
The client, a third-generation medical practitioner specializing in dermatology, requested a new clinic, housing, and storehouse for his collection, which includes paintings and books. We proposed three buildings (clinic, residential, and storage buildings) and four outer spaces (a courtyard, a front garden, a south garden, and a parking space) to be distributed in the new site. All three buildings have two stories and slightly elongated wall-like profiles and are close to each other. This layout creates a courtyard that is blocked off from the surroundings. This courtyard is visually closed off from the surroundings but also open to passers-by, decreasing the size of the openings of each building to the courtyard side. In other words, its square proportions can stay smaller than those of the courtyard, and it is planned for various events as a small “activity core” or modernized “Masugata” (originally meaning a square inside a Japanese castle surrounded by walls to lure enemies) in Matsumoto City.
Furthermore, these three buildings share some compositions and are integrated with the same 455 mm-wide modules: a corridor of the clinic located between a flow of visitor line and office worker line, a residential located between the engawa (porches), and a storehouse with no horizontal flow line to achieve a typology combining rooms and circulation. The perforated panels attached to some interior walls of each building are designed to control the indoor acoustic environment and all buildings, similar to an exhibition space. In addition, 455 mm-wide perforated walls are attached to the partition in the rooms to serve as the air blow-off port for the vertical duct that conveys warm air from the first floor to the upper rooms. Hence, the pre-room resembles a corridor surrounding the rooms in the residential and serves as a buffer zone for improving the environmental performance of the rooms.
The storehouse has an obi sequence (originally, the obi was tied on the waist over a kimono; here, it means a consistent space by a standard span) of 3185 mm. The obi sequence in the residential and clinic buildings was widened to 910 mm and 1365 mm, respectively, on both sides (5915 mm, 5460 mm, and 4550 mm). An experimental shaft with a width of 455 mm was inserted from the top of the foundation slab to the bottom of the beam on the line of the eave at the center of the 3185 mm width. Sandwiching beams were placed on the through column to lower the buckling length, with the beam in between being omitted. Accordingly, a timber brace (bearing wall of a length of 910 mm or 1365 mm) was installed on both sides of the experimental equipment shaft. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a wood shock (the price of wood soared due to a shortage of wood, causing great uncertainty in Japan) during the design period. Accordingly, we had to size the timber materials before finalizing the design. Therefore, we set up the standard structural rule for the three buildings as the obi sequence (3185 mm) to optimize the amount of timber materials and flexibly respond to design changes.
