They consist of a dental clinic and a house, which were built in a residential area in a suburb of Hachioji—a city located in the western part of Tokyo. The building site was previously a field, and we planned to construct a dental clinic, a house, a garage for two cars, and a parking lot for seven patients’ cars at the site, which was spacious enough to accommodate all these structures and provide a comfortable working and living environment.
Locating the garage and the parking lot close to the road that runs in front of the clinic makes them easiest to use if the need to put a car into and pull it out of the garage or the parking lot is taken into consideration. In this case, however, the buildings would have to be arranged at the back of the site, an arrangement that would diminish the dental clinic’s presence in the neighborhood. If the buildings were arranged at the front, on the other hand, there would be problems with the flow plan to park nine cars in the garage and the parking lot.
Therefore, we arranged the garage on the side of the front road, secured as much space as possible between the garage and the dental clinic by arranging the latter as far away from the garage as possible, and designed the house so that one of its ends barely stayed on the edge of the garage and the other on the edge of the dental clinic. By doing so, we achieved our two goals: making the parking space easy to use and emphasizing the presence of the structures.