The Science of Coexistence Planning
This facility integrates a nursery school and a children’s center. While both serve children, their functions differ significantly. The nursery school offers full-day care for infants and toddlers aged 0 to 5, requiring strict security measures to prevent children from leaving on their own or unauthorized entry from outside. The children’s center, by contrast, is open to a broader age range—from infants to high school students—and allows relatively free access. The coexistence of facilities with such distinct roles is likely to become an important trend in future public architecture.
The site is located in a suburban residential area, facing the green space of an elementary school to the south, with detached houses and apartment buildings on the remaining three sides. The required program area of approximately 2,000 m² had to be accommodated within a site of the same size. Considering the need to secure a playground for the nursery, these conditions are extremely tight for this type of facility.
To house both programs and provide 13 parking spaces within these constraints, the design adopts an atypical three-story configuration for a facility intended for young children. The semi-basement level contains parking and kitchen facilities. On the second level, the nursery faces the south-side playground, while the children’s center occupies the north side. A shared administrative office is positioned centrally, mediating between the two. The east entrance branches left and right, separating access routes and thereby accommodating the differing security requirements. The third level is dedicated exclusively to the nursery, with a central outdoor terrace that serves as a play deck and pool area in summer.
Because the nursery provides full-day care for children aged 0 to 5, each nursery room must function independently, tailored to the developmental stage of the children—a key distinction from kindergartens, which serve children aged 3 and older for only a few hours per day. As a result, each nursery room is enclosed, forming a highly autonomous space. To counteract this, glass surfaces at adult eye level enhance transparency, enabling staff to visually monitor children even across distant rooms.
Although vertically stacked over three levels, the building maintains a sense of ground connection through a three-dimensional outdoor network linking the playground, stairways, and second-floor terrace. This strategy aims to make not only the classrooms but also a variety of other spaces within the facility places where children feel at home. In section, the nursery’s playroom (second floor) and the children’s center’s playroom (first floor) are staggered to ensure independence, yet openings between them allow for a subtle visual connection, making the presence and activities of each perceptible to the other.
The courtyard located between the nursery and the children’s center serves both to separate the two programs and to function as a shared outdoor space. Such “in-between” spaces have the potential to foster diverse activities, though from a security standpoint they inevitably introduce a degree of ambiguity. Whether to allow such spaces to exist—and how best to make use of them—will likely depend on future societal consensus.