Unimori engineers at the construction of the Sokagawa Community Center after the Japan earthquake

UNEMORI ARCHITECTS has completed the “ Sokagawa Community Center ” in Fukushima, a multi-purpose building complex of 13,698 square meters (147,444 square feet) that houses a library, museum, lecture hall, childcare support as well as a café, among others. The project was developed as part of a municipal reconstruction project to revitalize the severely damaged city center after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. Built in cooperation with ishimoto Architecture and Engineering, the five-story building features open floor setbacks, cantilever panels and a floor plan based on Activity.

The Sokagawa Community Center houses a wide range of cultural and entertainment activities that seek to renew community life and establish a long-term, multi-use relationship between the city and its citizens. Topics of activities such as “augmentation”, “operating”, “creating”, “learning” and “meeting”, dividing the multi-purpose building into different areas of work, while the traditional library categories are reclassified to create an entirely new system. Hiroyuki Onemori, founder of UNEMORI ARCHITECTS, told designboom in a Zoom interview, “Together with the library items, we have edited about 250,000 books from scratch into a new classification original for Sokagawa City.”

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Together with ishimoto architecture and engineering firm, UNEMORI ARCHITECTS developed the Sokagawa Community Center as a complex structural system. The building is designed as an interlocking structure based on different floor slabs, which are divided into small and overlapping sections to form a gradual setback to the site facing the historic main street. Its interior is characterized by an open plan and balanced floor levels that partially appear to float freely in the center cavity. This complex structural system was made possible by a massive steel structure located on the third and fourth floors.

Designboom spoke with hiroyuki unemori, founder of UNEMORI ARCHITECTS, about designing a community building after a major natural disaster, and how they completely reorganized the Japanese library system to create something unique to Sokagawa. Read the full interview below.

Designboom (DB): The Sokagawa Community Center was developed in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. How does the new design respond to future natural disasters?

UNEMORI ARCHITECTS (UA): The Sokagawa Community Center is a project after the Great Earthquake in Eastern Japan, which is why we tried to deal with it in a hard and soft way. For a solid design, we stacked a series of panels and moved them to the side to create outdoor terraces. This allows us, in the event of a disaster, to evacuate the building through outside terraces and stairs. Also, in the current situation of Coronavirus, the interior can be better ventilated not only through the terraces but also through the large windows. As for the soft design, this building has become a base for many generations of citizens, from children to the elderly, who can visit this building and work in it on a daily basis. By doing this, you can see the faces of the citizens and understand the building. These daily use functions are effectively for evacuation and mutual aid in the event of a disaster.

Dade Brooks: What are the demands and challenges, if any, of designing a building to revitalize the devastated downtown of Sokagawa?

UA: After the earthquake, the city was so deserted that most of those walking around have disappeared. So, by creating several terraces, we made it possible to see people directly from the city and I wanted to encourage the city with the appearance of the people working in this building. I also wanted to create a building that would allow one to walk around the city and continue with the city. Sokagawa is a city with many slopes, and this site also has level differences of about 2.5 meters between east and west. In order to relate the level differences, the floor in the first level was transformed into a slope as a whole so that one could pass through the building and connect to the city. However, such terraces and sloped floors are very difficult to achieve in Japanese public facilities for reasons such as safety. But we succeeded in achieving this project through a lot of discussions with the concerned people.

DB: What are the audience’s demands and how have you incorporated them into your design concept? What activities are included in the multi-purpose building plan?

Urgent Action: About 35 public workshops took place from the design inception to the completion of the building, and 1,400 opinions were expressed. There were many different demands, and some of them were a little crazy, like wanting a hot spring or a planetarium. However, when we heard these views, many of them overlapped with jobs, such as the desire to teach food, or education in the form of a cooking class, and it would be nice if the children’s playground and library were nearby. Perhaps after the earthquake we realized that there is a potential demand among citizens to communicate with someone. After this workshop, we revisited a complex facility that had only had different functions until then to create a new architecture with integrated functions. This building is a multifunctional complex of libraries and a community center that supports childcare. Therefore, we tried to break it down into activities and reclassify it into nine axes. Books are arranged by topic. The entire building is a library, forming an integrated architecture that is a place of activity. For example, we have arranged books on making things in the immediate vicinity of the crafts room. Additionally, books on cooking were set up near the cooking studio, and books such as picture books were placed on the indoor playground. By doing this, even if the children are not interested in the books, they will still encounter them. It can also happen the opposite. People who come to take books can encounter these activities.

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