Category C: Industrial Buildings
Honorable Mention
Award credit: Toshihiro Mizutani, Hiroshi Kimura, KAJIMA DESIGN, Tomoko Fuchigami
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Photography: provided by TOSHIHIRO MIZUTANI ARCHITECTS
Waste disposal facilities are often attached with strong negative impressions. Generally, people tend to think of them as being a nuisance because of the noise they create and the smells that emanate from them. This project renews Musashino City’s 33-year-old waste incineration plant in Tokyo, Japan, to create the new Musashino Clean Center, an open waste treatment eco-facility where citizens can gather freely and engage in a variety of activities. This new facility aims to create a place that will serve as a base for urban development in the area in an integrated manner, around the main topic of waste disposal.
The facility is situated across the city hall, in the middle of a residential area, which made it essential to ensure consensus among the residents in the surrounding area to allow the project to operate. This turned out to be more challenging than expected because of the Covid epidemic as people were wary about meeting in person or coming in contact with people. Nevertheless, the design team prevailed and made enough progress to establish a design philosophy to build a facility that operates beyond just a simple cleaning plant to also highlight social environmental issues using garbage as a prompter. In line with that, the program extends outside basic operational functions to also present Musashino Clean Center as a place where people can engage in a variety of activities that have never before been included in a waste refinement plant.
The building has been designed to look unlike a typical waste incineration plant with an exterior that harmonizes with the landscape. With part of the building situated underground, it adapts to the scale of the residential neighborhood with ease. Visitors can tour the open treatment facility and observe the waste disposal process, so that they may better grasp the big picture of waste production and its impact on the environment, and the significant part humans can play in environmental conservation.
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