Nasushiobara Community Center Kururu

那須塩原市まちなか交流センター くるる

A public space built in front of Nasushiobara, Kuroiso. We sought to create a new kind of regional exchange centre.

Our first idea was to build a large roof and create a new kind of indoor place for local citizens, a place where various activities could compete under one big roof. Rather than being a series of disconnected multipurpose spaces, we wanted to bring the activities of the locals out into the open, to create a space of new encounters.

We engaged in a series of workshops to hear about what kind of activities were hoped for,, and we together came up with the notion of ‘a house for interaction, that nurtures people and food.’ We created a sequence of ‘activity areas’ aligned on the edge of a food court like space that focused on a multiplicity of centers, hubs of localised activity.

The large roof stretched 60m down and 20m across, with a ceiling height of roughly 6m. The scale of the space means that the feeling of being inside a building is diminished and being inside actually feels like an extension of the urban experience.

The substructure used to support the roof forms into a forest of 33 flat steel columns at varied orientation, that creates a rhythmic variation across the space, triggering different activities throughout. A secondary roof runs along the edge of the main space, harmonizing the main structure with the surrounding scale of the city. The curved roof was designed structurally as a mechanism to transmit the seismic load from the main structure, while spatially creating a space of small scale human activities, that all take shape under the low roof, blending into the small streets outside.

By internalizing the public square, we were very much concerned by how to connect this building to the street. Instead of turning our back on the car park, we embraced it as a practical condition of the suburban countryside. By seeing the car park as an active way of approaching outdoor public space, we transformed the street space into an activity hub, a space of temporal activity that provides a platform for community to grow

We hope that new activities and communities will emerge from the architecture, to become an experimental factory for community development, contributing to the culture of the Kuroiso area.