Grand arch - community center in Gotsu, Japan

Architectural Review, The, July, 1996 by Hugo Sinclair

A small town in Japan called on Shin Takamatsu to make a social and cultural centre that would give the community presence. He responded with a building that combines figure with remarkable quirkiness.

Gotsu in the Shimane Prefecture, which is to the west of Hiroshima in southern Japan, is not a large community, but it has grand ideas. The municipality commissioned Shin Takamatsu to make a communal and cultural centre which would be a focus for the town. The programme was ambitious: the centre is to contain a 700 seat general-purpose hall, a library for 70 000 books, offices for the town's social welfare department, as well as various other functions.

Takamatsu's parti is deceptively simple. Three similar sized strips (30 m by 170 m) run parallel from south-west to northeast, taking their orientation from the neighbouring newly completed hospital. The northernmost strip is to be a solid block of trees, clipped to a perfect rectangle, but carved into like the huge parterres at Versailles by unexpected spatial incidents: rectangles, squares and the like. The green block is penetrated by diagonal routes that link it to the next strip: a formal paved square for civic functions and idling. The final strip is the building, which offers a grey crenellated outline against the sky and forms a picturesque and firmly enclosing southern edge to the piazza. To the south-eastern side of the site is the car park, which receives a mirror image of the long elevation, and from here presumably, most people will enter the building. This is done through an opening in the outer low concrete wall which leads to a long semi-external porch which itself opens (not opposite the aperture you have just penetrated) into the foyer of the theatre. Stairs and lifts ascend to the upper level, from which most people enter the hall. The foyer is one of the several transverse moves across the plan at right angles to the outer parallel layers of circulation.

These transverse elements (mainly circulation) carve the plan into an order which juxtaposes contained spaces (the auditorium and the library) with open ones that are surrounded by glazed walls. The immediate associations for a European of these courts are of the medieval cloister, but on reflection, others suggest themselves, and indeed, the whole parti can be seen as a re-interpretation of some kinds of traditional Japanese planning, with larger spaces opening from surrounding thinner ones and open courts in the middle of the mass.

If the planning reflects on tradition in a modern way, the external form does not. The taller elements of the skyline emphasise the presence of the transverse elements of the plan. The lower projections provide light to the circulation areas below. The highest one is for celebration: a huge square arch to emphasise the theatre foyer. At night, the interior of this arch glows welcomingly and symbolically; the walls, dark against the sky, are made magical by little lights that pick out the constellations. A similar device is used on the curtain in the auditorium, which itself is a plain concrete hall, relieved by the warmth of the sound-reflectors, and the softness of the dark blue seats.

So far, only part of the proposed complex has been built: the hall is there, and some of the offices. But the library (which is to terminate the long axis to the north-east) and the piazza itself are still not there, and it will be some years before the great parterres take their intended form.

Even when the piazza is built, it is not likely to be very welcoming: elegant enough, but lacking the small-scale activities - shops, cafes and so on which make European public spaces attractive. Yet the sensibilities are very different. There is, for instance, little or no tradition of large public spaces in Japan. As if to emphasise such cultural differences, Takamatsu remarks on the difficulties of penetrating the building, and moving through its volume, 'such a space could be seen as very inconvenient. To tell the truth, on many levels the workability of this architecture depends on whether or not the strength can be developed to control such inconvenience'.