This project renovates a dental clinic that has served the community since 1963, updating it to meet modern requirements. The site originally contained both a residence built by a house manufacturer and a reinforced concrete (RC) clinic building. The initial conditions were modest yet complex: demolishing the aging and cramped RC clinic while partially reusing the residence to construct an extension for the new dental clinic. When the existing residence is a type-approved house manufacturer’s home, building code requirements become more stringent than for additions to conventional wooden houses. To address this, we adopted a construction method unusually substantial for a small-scale building: a timber addition structurally independent from the existing residence, with all contact surfaces connected by expansion joints. This highlights an issue for the future—when extending type-approved homes, more flexible interpretations of the Building Standards Act and its enforcement ordinances would be desirable.
The dental clinic follows an orthodox floor plan. Within the constraint of reusing part of the existing residence, the layout was inevitably shaped by requirements such as securing the necessary number of treatment units, clearly separating patient and staff circulation paths, and compactly organizing staff work areas. Our design approach was to shape spaces according to their functions while carefully controlling ceiling heights and light quality. The core medical circulation zone features high ceilings and bright daylight from clerestory windows. In contrast, the route from the waiting area to the treatment rooms has lower ceilings and is illuminated by soft light from low windows. Positioned between these areas, the treatment rooms use partitions to separate each unit, ensuring privacy. These three distinct spatial conditions, though independent, naturally convey a state where different qualities of light coexist. We believe that spaces where diverse levels of brightness overlap represent a fundamental essence of architecture, regardless of function. In this project, we sought to create spaces where the presence of light could be experienced directly by thoroughly minimizing details.