Located in the foothill of Mt. Fuji, Japan Guide Dog Center is a place for training guide dogs. The number of this institution is only a few in Japan, and this program was totally unfamiliar to us. In order to design a building with unique program like this case, there are many criteria to be met. However, instead of answering one by one, we were thinking how to create a place satisfying those criteria – sometimes contradicting such as independence-wholeness or security-openness, for example – at once seeking through the theme of designing distance.
The final idea came up with a format of connecting small buildings by a corridor, which sounds very simple rule. The buildings are designed according to the phase of dog training and gathering of people. The corridor that connects those small buildings becomes a gallery for the visitors, and it also determines a boundary of exterior field for dog training.
We found this designing method –discovering rule that would support the establishment of the building– totally different from the way of designing every parts of the building, from site planning to detail drawing. This new method would bring that while each part of the building has its own presence, the building as a whole has unified yet ambiguous outline.
The expectation that this place could be used for other programs like kindergarten or museum implies us that the program is a mere hypothesis for creating space.
At the same time, this format is also led from the site terrain. The format of zigzag corridor that can be found at a mountain trail represents the character of the site, overwhelming ground and gentle slope of Mt. Fuji.
The universality of architecture, which we tried to obtain by searching for the rule of the site, stands on the space that allows flexible usages even though the format itself is led from the site.
