John Adrian
Social Brewery
Urban Repair
Interactive and Autonomous Caring System for Senior and Younger Generation
Emily Yuan
Japan’s population is aging and shrinking fast. There is a rift between the fast-paced society and certain social groups.
This project is creating an interactive and partly autonomous system to respond to the rift between the senior and younger generations and the entire social system.
This system mainly includes senior apartments, a senior activity complex, and a childcare center. This system provides not only caring and educating programs but also the opportunity to operate some small commercial and production functions for the senior and younger generations to contribute to and participate more in social interactions in a larger-scale social environment. Within this system, the daily lives of different social groups are blended within this hybrid space and create opportunities for unexpected social interactions by making functions and spaces juxtaposition.
Meanwhile, the construction strategies of doing adaptive reuse step by step and transforming some of the former residential space into a caring system also represent the concept of dealing with the shrinking society and dealing with the leftovers of society.
Typology: Autonomous community complex
Program: Senior apartment, senior activity center, childcare center, cemetery
Scale: 1020 square meters (site area)
Material: Steel, metal, mesh, wood
Mapping of senior people and children on the main street of Nezu. Senior generations are generally facing the problem of social isolation, and some of them are facing the problem of re-employment; As for the younger generation, due to insufficient social system support, inadequate childcare facilities, and high childcare costs, Japanese society has been suffering from a low birth rate
From the façade of the building, there is a comparison between the solid façade of the original building and the porous façade of the new building, and since the transparent façade can be looked through, people walking on the street can also take a glimpse at the activities inside the building
The project contains three different urban typologies, the high-rise typical Tokyo apartment group, the low-height house cluster in the middle, and the temples with graveyards in the back. The mixture of different typologies also provides aspirations and opportunities to establish a hybrid and diverse space
The formal language of this part is like a plate or a podium holding up a series of light and transparent small volumes, helping create more opportunities for outdoor activities
Text and images © Emily Yuan, 2024
This project was conducted as part of “Rethinking Metabolic Rift: Tokyo: Architecture Between Scales and Typologies”, a spring 2024 studio at the Harvard GSD. Please click here to read more about this studio and see other projects.
