An outdoor café terrace attached to MIRAI CONVENIENCE STORE is now open. Although many people visit Kito as a result of the birth of MIRAI CONVENIENCE STORE, the café terrace has an important purpose other than improving the functionality to stay during the daytime hours. The cafe terrace was asked to be a place where people can see how beautifully it stands in the village outside of business hours, such as at night or at dawn, and to provide an opportunity to question the meaning of architecture standing in the midst of nature and the local community. To achieve this, we believed it was necessary to give visitors a sense of the past, present, and future of this place.
　The concept is the combination design that transcends time. The design incorporated the things that originally existed here and the things that will be built here in equal proportions. The café terrace, built on the site of the closed Kitagawa Elementary School, retains its original stone walls, and the newly constructed retaining wall. The terraced topography of the site is utilized, and the terrace was built with concrete to fill in the missing parts such as the grand staircase and the floor. The vegetation is a mixture of the old and new nature, with the native vegetation and the newly planted vegetation interwoven and illuminated equally with gentle light.
　The fusion of the architecture, which gives form to Kito's identity, and the landscape, which transcends time, has resulted in the completion of MIRAI CONVENIENCE STORE that will be a sense of what Kito has been and what it will be in the future.