Sendai Christian Home is ‘The Juristic Person of Social Welfare', which manages the children’s care home for infants to high-school students and has been established for 90 years. The idea is based on small group nursing. ‘The Master Plan of Hill-Top Home 2000 Total Welfare Village’ was provided in 1991 and this facility is the first stage of the plan.
The site is located on the residential area near the central part in Sendai city, where it is blessed with nature and scattered with marsh sediment and trees. It comes out a little steep with a 20 meters difference in the elevation. Facilities had to be compactly placed into the slope to leave existing open space and it was made to be a three-story building. Utilising the difference of elevation of the site, the main entrance was established on the third floor of the street level.
Concepts were created with the following three ideas.
1. As open facilities in the inside and outside; the wall is possibly decreased in the living space to afford nice views. The courtyard is also to afford views of the top and bottom floors, lighting, ventilation, the mutual and visual communication of tenants and staffs.
2. A realisation that everybody associatis spaces with normalisation; ‘removable wall’ was used for partitions of the private rooms to correspond to various usages.
3. Assuming the barrier free; it was considered to remove all levels differences and installed protectors on most corners of the doorways.
Gentle and soft ‘space of interface’, in which the native scene of the site remained, was devised so that the RC retaining wall may leave without establishing the slope at the outdoor space.
Location:Komatsushima, Sendai, Japan
Principal use:nursing home for the aged
day care centre
centre of home nursing for support
Finished time: 1993.3
Site area:8,251m²
Total floor area:2,871 m²
Structure:reinforced concrete (bearing wall)
pillar of pin support
void slab; 3 stories
