Otonoha School, Japan Building, Photo, Osaka, Design, Image

Otonoha School Japan : Ibaraki Architecture

Ibaraki Project by Tetsuya Matsui + Tomoko Murata, UZU, Japan

20 Apr 2009

Otonoha School

Location: Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan

Date built: 2006

Design: Tetsuya Matsui, UZU

Photographs : Akiyoshi Fukuzawa

Otonoha School is a nursery school that provides children with nature and music. The symbol is a tree with note.

Rice fields are left all around the city. In the surroundings, we made the floors connected to the fields of rice ear and the hills that children can climb and look.

Feeling a good crop of rice

The children become familiar with how rice which is Japanese staple food grows. The children under one-year old and theone-year old children grow, seeing the scenery of farming outside the window from the room on the first floor everyday. The children from two-year old to five-year old experience the farming with the farmers in the neighborhood. They plant rice, watch living creatures, harvest rice, make rice balls with their parents and have a lunch party.

Feeling the sound

Children feel the rhythm when they play eurythmics and they also feel the sound when they run together with it. The room on the second floor can be divided from one-room to twelve spaces by wooden partitions and lace curtains with various sizes and atmosphere. The deck in the south connects to the big stairs and the green slope where a school teacher planted clovers and the field.

This is a space that has an image for the practice of eurythmics. The inside and the outside are connected and go through with a mixture of various sounds such as the sound of instrument, the voice of children, the sound of wind in the field and insects.

The two artists designed to add the softness of nature to the interior. The light and curtains harmonized with the motion of wind and children. Everything around the environment becomes as one.