Detail of the project ed. 2020

ALPHAV­ILLE – CATHOLIC SUZU­KA CHURCH

Design­er Ken­taro Takeguchi + Asako Yamamoto
Loca­tion 3–17‑5, Kanbe, Suzu­ka city, Mie, Japan
Design Team

Archi­tec­ture:
Alphav­ille asso­ciates Co., Ltd.
/Kentaro Takeguchi, Asako Yamamo­to, Tomo­hisa Koike

Cab­i­net­work:
pivoto
/Keiji Tsu­jii, Eichi­ro Shi­ro, Asako Yamashita
Year 2015
Pho­to credits

Toshiyu­ki Yano

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

The pre­sent­ed project is a church locat­ed at the city of SUZU­KA, the HON­DA motor indus­try area, and con­sists of a chapel, con­fer­ence and social activ­i­ties hall along with father’s res­i­dence. As a wider for­eign­er Catholic com­mu­ni­ty is increas­ing rapid­ly, it was required to pro­vide not only a pray­ing and med­i­ta­tion space but also a com­mu­ni­ty space for the for­eign­ers in SUZU­KA city. Two exist­ing church­es where buried in the neigh­bor­hoods locat­ed at the inter­sec­tion of the old way and the new motor­way, and so we pro­posed a big­ger one with a expres­sive roof, which reminds of the beau­ti­ful moun­tain range sur­round­ing this area, to unite three dif­fer­ent usage build­ings. Used for com­mu­ni­ty gath­ers and mass­es on Sun­days, the whole church is lift­ed up to gain enough car park­ing area. The roof is split every five meters in to the park­ing lot mod­ule, to make high-side lits that intro­duce the nat­ur­al light from the south into the inte­ri­or where rooms of var­i­ous sizes from chapel to bed­rooms are crowd­ed. The pilots and the two entrance lob­bies on the sec­ond floor are con­nect­ed with two gen­tly inclined stair­cas­es and form a plaza under the roof where peo­ple gath­er cre­at­ing a atmos­phere not sep­a­rat­ed from the motor­ized city. The archi­tec­ture includes the street between the build­ings and the com­mu­ni­ty and is filled with envi­ron­men­tal­ly effi­cient win­dows cut by park­ing mod­ule. With ref­er­ence to the rever­sal phe­nom­e­non by “Nori’s figure/ground the­o­ry”, we cre­at­ed a lob­by as an exten­sion of the pass-way, manip­u­lat­ing the rela­tion­ship between the amount of “inside out” space aim­ing at a “church” where vis­i­tors can feel at easy to gath­er and use. Thus this Catholic com­mu­ni­ty build­ing legit­i­mates Euro­pean archi­tec­ture mar­ried with sub­ur­ban Amer­i­can park­ing con­text in Japan.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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