Project Name: Omura Children's Clinic

Location: Nagasaki, Japan

Design Team: Design Associates Nakamura

Total Floor Area: 149 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Masaki Hamada

Feature:

Project - Situated in Nagasaki, Japan, the Omura Children's Clinic designed by Design Associates Nakamura reimagines pediatric healthcare through a series of child-scaled gabled roofs that transform a clinical environment into a comforting, home-like sanctuary. This 149-square-meter structure completed in 2025 challenges conventional medical architecture by prioritizing emotional wellbeing alongside functional requirements, creating a dual-purpose environment that simultaneously serves its young patients and their accompanying parents.

The project's most distinctive design achievement lies in its unique architectural language: a succession of small gabled roofs deliberately proportioned to a child's scale. This thoughtful reduction in scale transforms what could be an intimidating medical facility into an approachable structure that speaks directly to its primary users. The repeated gable motif creates visual rhythm while maintaining accessibility, ensuring children perceive the space as non-threatening and familiar, effectively alleviating children's fears during medical visits.

The architectural narrative reinforces this residential character through material selection. Abundant timber surfaces throughout the interior replace the typical clinical coldness with tactile warmth, encouraging children to feel secure during examinations. The extensive use of wood also establishes continuity between interior and exterior, where surrounding trees create a natural buffer that further distances the clinic from conventional medical aesthetics. The designers abandoned the traditional cold impression of clinics, creating an open medical space filled with natural atmosphere.

The clinic's dual-functionality design extends beyond the children themselves. Design Associates Nakamura recognized that parents require their own sense of comfort, designing communal areas that evoke café-like hospitality rather than traditional clinical waiting rooms. This dual consideration ensures the space functions as a genuine community hub where families feel invited to linger rather than merely endure waiting time. After project completion, this clinic has become a place cherished by the local community, fulfilling the designers' intention to create a space where children can relax and parents feel comfortable.

The result is architecture that fundamentally reconsiders the pediatric healthcare experience. By abandoning institutional conventions in favor of domestic familiarity, the Omura Children's Clinic demonstrates how thoughtful spatial design can actively reduce medical anxiety. The project stands as a compelling argument for human-centered healthcare architecture, where building form and material choices directly contribute to patient comfort and community integration, becoming an innovative paradigm in medical architecture design.

Design Team - Design Associates Nakamura (DAN) represents a unique intergenerational architectural practice that bridges traditional Japanese craftsmanship with contemporary design thinking across its Nagasaki and Tokyo offices. Founded in March 1981 by Hiromi Nakamura in Nagasaki, the firm established its foundation in timber-centric architecture deeply responsive to natural contexts. This four-decade legacy expanded significantly in October 2020 when So Nakamura, who was born in Isahaya, Nagasaki in 1986, established the Tokyo office after serving as senior architect at Kengo Kuma and Associates from 2013 to 2020.

The practice's design philosophy centers on two fundamental principles: architecture employing timber construction and structures that integrate seamlessly with natural environments. This commitment manifests in projects that prioritize proximity to nature, distinctive spatial richness, occupant comfort, and site-specific responses that could not exist elsewhere. The firm believes architecture should maintain close relationships with nature, creating comfortable environments through individualized and enriched spaces, realizing architectural value that can only be achieved at specific sites.

So Nakamura brings rigorous academic credentials, having completed his Master's degree in Architecture from Tokyo Denki University's Graduate School of Future Sciences in 2013, following his undergraduate studies in the Department of Architecture. His experience at one of Japan's most internationally recognized architectural offices informs DAN's contemporary practice while maintaining continuity with the firm's established values. Under So Nakamura's leadership, the Tokyo office integrates cutting-edge design concepts with the traditional wisdom of the Nagasaki office, forming a unique design methodology.

The studio undertakes comprehensive architectural services spanning residential design, renovation projects, commercial spaces, and office facilities, accepting commissions regardless of geographic location throughout Japan. DAN's commitment to natural material application and environmental harmony ensures that each architectural intervention operates not merely as functional space, but performs positive spatial transformation of its environmental context through thoughtful design strategies, creating architectural works that genuinely belong to and are cherished by local communities.