Buildings that form a group are necessarily influenced to no small degree by each other. Gazing into the approx. 9000㎡ of vacant land, I speculated about what the first building should be like. What was initially planned as a common element of the building group was to make the buildings low-rise timber structures with a distinctive function attached to each one. Thus, to create a place for creativity in later projects, the β1 (House 1) building was designed to accommodate a woodworking factory, which was later named “β Factory,” besides study and lodging equipment.

β Factory (DFF-W: Digital Fabrication Factory-Wood) houses various wood processing machines including large machines such as a CNC milling machine and robot arms along with spacious workspaces inside and outside of the factory for the assembly of articles processed into various shapes, which are accessible by vehicle. For the construction of the building, students themselves processed threshold sills, some face materials, furniture, and signs using woodworking machines before relocation for their own use.

In β1, square bedrooms are located on the sides of the inner courtyard and foyers in the northern part of the building and are connected by the spacious workspace on the southern side. The bedrooms’ sliding doors can be opened up to make a larger space and the workspace can be partitioned at each beam to leave room for new usages of the building that may be planned in the future. Exteriors are simple but composed of different shapes and materials representing different functions of sections, which were designed out of a desire to embed multiple cues to generate color and shape relationships with other buildings that would be built around it. (Futoshi Kawata)