Matsubara Civic Library

Matsubara-city, Osaka, Japan

Photo © Kai Nakamura

Libraries

Architects: MARU.architecture

Location: Matsubara-city, Osaka, Japan
Year: 2019

In Matsubara City,there are the reservoirs for agricultural water and huge ancient tombs scattered among residential areas as a landscape. Although these are "artifact" objects, they have become part of the city's ordinary landscape as if they were "natural" objects through the passage of time. The site of this project was a part of a reservoir, which was supposed to be reclaimed to build a building. In recent years, the reclamation has become one of the methods to secure land for construction. However, when we imagined this place over a long period of time, it seemed to us that the best way to stay close to the history of the city was to create a building that would accept the environment of the reservoir and continue to stand strong in it. Originally, water and architecture are incompatible, but civil engineering structures such as dams and retaining walls exist in harmony with water. Architecture and civil engineering buildings differ not only in terms of performance, but also in the strength of their existence as artifacts. So we thought that architecture that stands in a civil engineering manner would be suitable for transcending the times.