Unemori teco Architects (UtA) designed an open and inclusive space for the Kitakami Health & Childcare Support Complex in Kitakami, Japan.

This project involves the conversion of the first and second floors of an eight-story commercial building located in the city center into a health and childcare support complex. In addition to providing functions including a hall for medical checkups, indoor playground, exhibition/lecture hall, consulting room, rental room, and office, we also aimed to create open spaces where people can freely visit and spend time not only for these purposes.

The existing building consisted of simple rectangular grids with a floor area of about 2000㎡. There were hardly any openings in the exterior walls, so the interior of the building could not be seen from outside. For this reason, we decided to create an indoor plaza occupying two structural spans in depth by four structural spans in width in the center of the first floor and connect it to the city at large. It is a high-ceiling space partially with an atrium, equipped with a cafe and consultation counter and serving as an entrance and waiting area to the surrounding rooms with various functions. In addition, it is designed as a multi-purpose plaza that can accommodate mobile medical and catering vehicles, and host events. The entire floor, with the indoor plaza at the center, is covered by a gently undulating luminous ceiling.

The ceiling, with a height difference of about 1.5m from 3.9m to 2.4m, is designed to ensure minimum head clearance for vehicles while leaving adequate duct space above the ceiling. Shadows and undulations created by the luminous ceiling give a sense of depth to the space. Under the undulating luminous ceiling, we have provided a variety of seating areas, both “with-shoes” and “shoe-free,” with varying textures and sitting height with the hope that this accumulation of everyday places would create a new landscape. The ceiling straddles the upper and lower floors, becomes a floor for the play equipment, and appears as eaves on the facade, so that it interacts with the existing shopping arcade and allows people’s activities inside to be seen from the street.

In this project, we drastically changed the role of the building from a facility serving specific purposes to an architecture creating a new landscape where people from all walks of life gather by deconstructing a mundane grid-based commercial building using a gently undulating ceiling and floors.

Design: Unemori teco Architects (UtA)
Photography: Kai Nakamura