in the heart of yurihonjo city, Japanese firm chiaki arai urban and architectural design has just completed a large-scale societal hearth titled the 'kadare cultural center'. the multi-faceted building, which was originally distributed between two sites sandwiching a road,combines the entire ensemble under one roof, creating a covered pedestrian 'gathering street' providing centralized access to,and separating the theater, library, planetarium and community center. working closely with local citizens, the architects designed each function with practical input from the people that use them to produce a spatially sensitive architecture that responds to human scale and usability and communicates logically within the sequence of spaces.
in order to house such a diverse program with varying needs and conditions, a repetitive and irregular concrete structure creates the opportunity for different scopes of spaces within one building. windows are punched through the outer shell not necessarily following an external aesthetic, but to provide the necessary amount of light where it is needed. in this way, each zone bestows a different experience and quality specific to its use, while maintaining the overall language of the construct. special attention was given to the project all the way down to the smallest details, such as the placement of the rocks in the exterior courtyard.
the walls are cast witha very particular texture of lines and voids, some of which are filled with small lights, and the ceilings are covered in metal panels of varyingthicknesses and perforations which provides a somatosensory environment.