Nakatsuji clinic | yutaka kawahara design studio

his project is a renovation of a clinic with dialysis facilities, situated on a main road leading to Mount Yoshino in Nara Prefecture, a world heritage site. In addition to updating the clinic’s facilities, the clinic director wanted to renew the exterior of the building. For clinic staff, a key issue was addressing glare and heat gain from solar radiation, particularly in the west-facing waiting area and dialysis room, where windows had to be kept covered. A further requirement was improving circulation, both from the entrance to the reception area, and from the waiting area to the consultation rooms. To this brief we added the issue of what we felt to be a lack of overall comfort, and then got to work on the planning of the exterior, entrance, reception and office, waiting area, dialysis room and dialysis lounge. We first proposed to clad the existing façade with weave-pattern metal panels. This proposal simultaneously resolved both solar radiation and circulation issues. The entrance was moved to the south-west corner, and, with this point made the starting-point of the cladding layout, the whole western façade of　the building, which faces onto the main road, was covered with panels. This new façade makes the position of the new entrance clear. The interlocking, woven structure of the aluminum panels acts to capture light: the interior is shielded from direct sunlight, while at the same time the interior-side of the panels is brightly illuminated; the panels function as a device for recovering light to the interior. In addition, the undulating angles of the surface were perforated with a flower pattern, allowing the landscape to be glimpsed through these perforations without any sense of glare. Light passing through the perforations projects flower patterns onto the inner sections of the panels, bringing pleasure to the patients; in the waiting area and lounge, the panels were arranged so that these patterns are also cast upon the floor. By the combination of inter-reflections between panels, light passing through the perforations and gaps in the weave, and direct light falling on a mixed composition of metallic pink and silver panels, the external appearance of the building, which was the clinic director’s primary concern, is given an expressivity which changes over time. At one moment, petal patterns float on the surface of the pink-tinted panels like a profusion of cherry blossoms; at the next, an expression of light and shade is deeply carved in three dimensions on the facade. The clinic is sited on a road leading from the city to Mount Yoshino, one of the most famous cherry tree viewing areas in Japan. In the blossom-viewing season the road is packed; it is also an important road in the daily lives of the locals. We thought that this renovation might offer to both sightseers and locals alike a multitude of messages, depending on their direction of view.