Akiha Ward Cultural Center     Niigata, Japan

- as the project architect at Chiaki Arai Urban and Architecture Design -

Located in a district famous for railway industry in Niigata city, this is a 3,000m2 public theater with 496 seats, which is designed to be the cultural incubator for the locals.  Sitting on a 17,000m2 former baseball field, the structure, landscape and parking are organized along the arc to evoke the site memory.  The surrounding area is a vast flatland with a few small hills.  Following some characteristics of the hills, the global form of the building is a terraced landscape where people can mount and take in the panoramic view.  The planning has been developed through workshops with the locals.  Several rooms and functions were added in response to their requests.  The countless transformations changed the building outline from a precise circle to a distorted circular form.  To accommodate the gap between the global form and the planning based on the workshop, the structural walls are bent and twisted to reach the balanced support points of the roof slabs.  The main hall is like a cave under the hill.  The concrete structure works as acoustic reflectors which give extraordinary acoustics by the force of its high specific gravity.  The heavy solid wall and ceiling can reflect the lower sound ranges which conventional wall materials absorb.  This provides special experiences like the concert in a natural cave, and not in a building.  The solid concrete looks sometimes massive, sometimes weightless, and implies warmth of human hands.
Throughout the process from design to construction supervision, Akira Sogo has worked hard to be the link between digital technology and craftsmanship.  In order to use of the digital model, which he carefully created at the design stage, at the construction site, he held many workshops on digital software for the all site workers.  The construction was a series of spectacular scenes.

This has been awarded the Murano Togo Prize in 2016 for the best Japanese architecture in the last three years.

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