- 2024-2025
- Japan
- Kawasaki
A corner of Kawasaki’s industrial zone. We designed a factory for DAIKO, a company with world-class metalworking capabilities, able to produce everything from kitchen cupboard parts to components for spacecraft. The project involved repurposing a building that once served as a private sports hall.
Stepping inside the building for a site survey: the smell, the echo of footsteps, the textures and shadows—all of it unmistakably says “sports hall.” You’d half expect to hear the thud of a bouncing ball from somewhere nearby.
There was something intriguing about the idea of embracing the gymnasium atmosphere, preserving it deliberately, and forcing it into a new role as a factory. But that feels a little reckless. Having said that, completely erasing that presence and replacing it with something entirely new felt like a waste—and a great expenditure of energy, in more ways than one.
What if, instead, we could carefully decipher the gymnasium’s atmosphere, and subtly rewrite it as if it had always been DAIKO’s factory? A bit like tweaking a document to conveniently change its meaning.
Not so much renovation or conversion, but falsification.
A building designed for sport naturally clashes with the requirements of a factory. Once we began mapping out spaces for design, fabrication, inspection, logistics, packing and shipping, it was clear we’d need far more floor area. There were no routes for heavy machinery or large materials to come and go either. So we gradually adjusted the building—extending it, opening up walls—until it could behave like a working factory.
A bent-glass steel partition salvaged during demolition became the wall of a new meeting room. A charming timber frame from a demolished wall found a home in one of the newly constructed partitions. Elements were carefully removed from their original place and reallocated where needed.
The warm red of the gymnasium’s timber panelling, the vivid green of the tennis practice wall, the faded brown of the old window frames—we referenced colour combinations unique to sports halls, sampling their hues as if with Photoshop’s eyedropper tool, to inform our palette for new surfaces and finishes. Epoxy and linoleum floors, tiles, timber slats, counters, curtains, fire shutters, and sprayed exterior walls. Regardless of scale, our manipulation of colour spread throughout the space, blurring the boundaries between old and new. Was the green of the tennis wall reflected in the epoxy floor, or had the floor’s colour somehow seeped into the wall?
Causality is fabricated, and the line between coincidence and inevitability becomes blurred. Was it there from the beginning, or was it newly made? Has it been moved, or simply painted? We are intrigued by a certain quality of space that emerges right when such distinctions no longer matter.
Category：Office / Factory
Architects：DOMINO ARCHITECTS
Collaborators：PRIME Corporation
Metal Processing ：DAIKO
Furniture Cooperation : MAS | Karimoku
Construction：PRIME corporation
Photographs：Gottingham
