Kindergarten chats - kindergarten school building in the town of Mizobe, Japan

Architectural Review, The, July, 1996 by Penny McGuire

Despite its modest size, this little kindergarten in southern Japan is a highly eclectic combination of biomorphism, colour and symbolism, intended to stimulate and nurture the imagination of its young users.

Shomyo Kindergarten was designed by Masaharu Takasaki for the inhabitants of Mizobe, a town in Kagoshima province in south Japan. Set among fields of cherry trees, next to the Shomyo Temple, the school is at once educationally visionary and playful. The combination is appealing - vision is not always accompanied by a sense of fun - and the engaging exterior, which appears vaguely biomorphic with strange bright colours and the suggestions of origami in the folds of metal cladding, seems the product of a child's free imagination. In reality this is a thoughtful expression of Takasaki's private philosophy and a consequence of the work he has been doing with children during the past 10 years.

He believes in the power on the psyche of invisible natural and atavistic forces, while nourishing a belief in human capacity to develop and progress. In working with children, Takasaki has studied the importance of play in a child's development, noting the child's innate creativity and feeling for nature, for colour and form, and this exotic little kindergarten is intended to nurture such things.

This is the second building by Takasaki in the area, the other being the extraordinary Kihoku Astronomical Museum at the southernmost tip of Kyushu (AR January 1990). Takasaki is inclined to feed into his designs symbolic representations of the cosmos and nature, as well as local folklore and tradition, so that very different and original structures have been produced, but the same mystical sensibility informs the architecture of both the buildings and gives them a certain recognisable kinship.

In balancing demands of site and purpose, Takasaki plainly enjoys creating a certain dramatic tension. The museum, of dark moulded concrete and looking like a mad space station, is poised for celestial contemplation in a setting of classical Japanese beauty; the kindergarten built of wood and crumpled metal, with eyes and sprouting legs, has an impromptu look. Together with the Shomyo Temple, the school is used as a community centre and a centre for regional culture. Modern intrusions into local tradition are balanced by a strong ancestral presence in the sacred and ancient Imperial tomb of Kouokusanjouryou, which spiritually anchors the place in time.

The complex architecture of the kindergarten is based on circle, triangle, square and spiral - imbued by Takasaki with cosmological significance and didactic purpose. He observes that such forms, innate in nature, are significantly also metaphysical symbols; the spaces they generate convey harmony and exert a soothing effect on children.

On plan, the building, which is really a loose complex of parts, resembles a stubby aircraft - or if you wish, an insect - with outspread wings either side of a head and body. The head is composed of two double-height halls linked under a domed roof, supported by splayed wooden columns and illuminated by a skylight and by cones of light. On plan, one hall is elliptical, the other is star-shaped, the different geometries generating the sections of columns and beams in each. An open courtyard flanked on each side by domed blocks of nurseries forms the body, while the wings contain ancillary accommodation like offices, a kitchen, rest room and so on.

Architecturally, the building refers to elements of Kagoshima tradition, They include the raised timber decking that supports the wooden superstructure, stepped down towards the courtyard; the egg-shaped dome of the Kouokusanjouryo tomb incorporated in the design of the main dome. Metaphors abound: contained in the forest of timber columns that support the wooden roof canopies of the two halls and those of the nurseries; and in skeletal expression so that the building appears protean fashion, in different guises - as a curious ark or skeletal animal. To Takasaki, the building is like a reclining child with arms outstretched 'calling to the sky'.

Takasaki's control of geometry and space is impressive. Within a single apparently hand-crafted envelope, he has created a series of spaces that contract and expand. Scaled down, curiously shaped and with windows at floor level, they become intimate places and corners for small children; blown up, they are grand enough for assemblies of parents, while all around, there is the comforting familiar presence of wood.

Takasaki's imagination streaked by folkloric memory is a moral one. It is interesting to note in passing that the silhouettes of both the museum and kindergarten incorporate the helmeted trace of Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum which, while remote in time (1913) and place (Dornach, Switzerland), had an equally didactic and spiritual purpose. PENNY MCGUIRE