Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP was commissioned by local owner The Care House to design a hotel medical building for children with difficult medical conditions and families with travel difficulties to help them regain The vitality of their daily lives.

The ocean is visible from the second-floor level, but the client wished for a single-story building surrounded by flora, as typical in Okinawa, where the families and staff could seamlessly spend time while being aware of each other’ s presence. When designing, Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP imagined nestling close to the bodies of bedridden children who gaze at a ceiling or window all day. With consideration of their eye level and body size, the studio placed sliding glass doors so they could enjoy the outside scenery and wind even from a side-lying position, low entrances and ceilings, and 8 m-deep wind chimneys about 1.8 m in diameter with a skylight on top that could be looked straight up when lying on the back. The wind chimneys take in the ocean breeze from high up during the day, while drawing the cool air from the shade of the north garden by creating buoyancy-driven ventilation.

For children with physical disabilities, the wind carries a lot of information; The ocean breeze that blows through the pine grove, the singing of insects and birds, the fragrance of indigenous flowers, and the humid scent of the tide and rain. We envisioned that this “scenery of wind” (in Japanese, the word “wind” consists of two letters; wind and scenery) would connect children with Okinawa’ s environment. The plan has a circular form that opens up equally to the surroundings, with all rooms facing outward. The communal bath and living-dining-kitchen area where people gather open up towards the garden with an abundance of natural light, while the four compact guestrooms are a bit darker and quiet for the children who tire easily can rest.

The outdoor stairs are designed to make it easy for staff and parents to support a wheelchair from both sides. Stairs that are generally considered to be a barrier were viewed as something positive and that trigger compassion and memories. This is based on the philosophy of the client who said, “Barrier-free designs protect their freedom and dignity, but we cannot eliminate all barriers.

Because the place also serves to educate the able-bodied, Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP experimented with this approach with a belief that imagining and merging with the physicality of others would serve as a foundation of a barrier-free society. Through such “practice of behavior,” the studio aims for this place to provide care for the society itself that we are part of.