Waseda University Honjo Senior High School Gymnasium - Natural Light Shines on Structural Ingenuity

As this is a gymnasium of a high school affiliated with a leading private university in Japan, its design concept flows from how it should be portrayed as an educational facility.

Generally speaking, gym windows are covered with blackout curtains when competitions are held. With this project, however, the aim was to create a gym allowing indirect natural light suitable for indoor exercises and blocking strong direct sunlight to afford a feel for the outside environment.

To achieve this goal, four structural “tubes” were designed around the perimeter of the arena. These tubes have an important role to play in the operation of the facility, as they house air conditioning, lighting, and sound equipment. Access is possible through hatches built into the walls. The outermost tube is the most spacious, and functions as a corridor, an indoor running track, and as a passageway for indirect light to pass through to the arena.

With small and large holes bored into the walls of the arena at strategic locations, natural daylight that penetrates to the arena core is pale and dim, akin to a midnight sun. This orientation obviates the need for blackout curtains.

The facility’s interior and exterior were both finished in fair-faced concrete. Ornamentation was kept to minimum to clarify the composition of the building. The structural layout is akin to a temple; the intent of the spatial configuration was to create a place where users can learn the “essence” of things.

The building is completely devoid of added color or paint, both inside and out; “primitive” grey concrete is its only signature. Rather, it might be more correct to say that one does not “feel” its color in the traditional sense. Instead, the space allows a sensitivity for light, materials, and a grasp of more a natural essence. This pursuit of “simple beauty” is divorced from secular worldly trends.

The gymnasium is designed to be an extension of the everyday; as students ascend the floors, their experience becomes gradually more extraordinary. However, the design intent is not that the everyday is “inverted” into the extraordinary, but rather into a more common, “everyday” experience. When designing this gymnasium, our thoughts were on the idea of architectural expression that can be modern, but also “universal” in the sense that it can belong to any era.

Material Used:
Main structure: Reinforced concrete/part steel