Frank la Rivière, Architects

NHA Nebuta House Aomori 070805

070805

We went for our first meeting with the Aomori City Team to Aomori. At night we were treated on a first hand experience with the nebuta festival. Actually for me this was already the third time. We both enjoyed the yatai like food served on the roof top of a building strategically located along the route as well as the view of the floats passing by and the widly dancing festival goers. But all didn’t stay that calm. Suddenly we were dressed up in yukata and straw slippers, ready to go! Lasera sera sera sera!

NHA Nebuta House Aomori START OF THE PROJECT

On May 6th 2007 I received an e-mail concerning a very interesting project in the North of Japan; The Nebuta House project for the city of Aomori. The message was send through by Dana Buntrock a good friend of mine who is an associate professor at the Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley. This is how I first was introduced to Stephanie Forsythe and Todd McAllen of molo design ltd Canada.
Todd & Stephanie form together a design studio based in Vancouver, Canada.
After winning the international competition called Aomori Northern Style Housing Competition judged by Tadao Ando and Jean Nouvel, Todd & Stephanie were asked to work out proposals for this building after it had become apparent that the sample function for this model housing project had diminished. The Nebuta House project, on the harbor front of Aomori City just in front of Aomori station, evolved from these preliminary studies.

The function of the building for which they had just finished the sketch design was centered on the culture connected to the Nebuta Festival for which Aomori City is famous. This cultural building will house a large exhibition space with the capacity to display 5 Nebuta floats and exhibition corner with the history of the festival, work spaces for the Nebuta artists, music rehearsal spaces and a theater space in such a way that this will all be part of a dynamic display of the Nebuta festival mood through out the year. The actual festival takes place in the first week of August each year.

The construction of the project is to coincide with the opening of the new Shinkansen line connecting Aomori to the fast train network and is meant to reinvigorate the declining city center. For that purpose the city has developed a regeneration plan for the harbor and center area and has successfully applied for subsidies from the government.
The Nebuta House project fits in this planning strategy.
Images of the housing competition can be found at URL: http://www.forsythe-macallen.com/images/Aomori/pages/Aomori.htmConcept images of the Aomori Nebuta House project http://www.molodesign.com/en/projects.html

At this very moment there was a need to come to a new engineering and architectural team that could work the Sketch Design up to a Basic design and do the Design Development Phase of the project. The structural engineers and MEP engineers were decided already. The new engineering team would consist of Kanebako Structural Engineering Office (URL: http://www.kanebako-se.co.jp ) for structural and P.T. Morimura for mechanical and electrical engineering (URL PTM: http://www.ptmtokyo.co.jp/ ).

They were still looking for an architectural team.
In response I proposed to set up an architectural team consisting of my own company FRA inc. together with Nakata Yasuo of dd/t Arch (URL: http://www.d-dt.co.jp & BLOG: http://nakata-ddt.seesaa.net/ ). Nakata san has worked for some 13 years in Maki Fumihiko’s office and one of the major projects he has worked on is the Asahi Television Building next to the Roppongi Hills in Tokyo. For both Nakata san and myself we were interested in taking on a larger scale project after having worked on smaller project recently and in particular a public works project with an interesting program and design. This proposal was accepted shortly afterwards both by Todd & Stephanie as well as the City of Aomori.

Image: one of the Nebuta floats of 1995