JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICESConcept
An office building that is also a school, a farm shop and a theatre
Rui Sekkeishitsu is an architecture and engineering practice, and it also runs a cram school, a farm, and a programme of regional work. Rather than distributing those into separate premises, it has stacked them into one building, and the section drawing is the argument.
The ground floor is a shop selling the produce of the company’s own farm. The third floor is a school for children from elementary age to high school, with a shared childcare room next to it. The fifth and sixth are the design and construction offices, run as a single open floor each with no partitions at all — what the company calls an agility office. The fourth is a workshop left as a skeleton, without finishes. And the seventh is a theatre-style room seating three hundred and fifty in a circle.
The practice describes all of this under the word co-creation, and the building makes the claim testable: the people who design schools are three floors above a working one.
01 · The second floor
Reception, and a hall of two hundred square metres
The reception is a long white counter with flowers on it. Beyond it the co-creation hall runs to about two hundred square metres, with glass-enclosed meeting spaces set into it.
02 · The material
Moss, timber, and daylight
The interiors are built out of natural materials — a wall finished in moss behind a run of desks, timber screens, and planting brought inside.
03 · The agility office
One floor, no partitions
The design and construction floors are run as single open rooms with nothing dividing them, which the company calls an agility office.
04 · Books, models and a dark room
What a practice keeps
A library of shelving runs along one wall. Elsewhere, the model tables, and a meeting room finished dark with a screen at the end.
