He Has Designed Kindergartens for More Than 40 Years. A Kindergarten, He Says, Is Not a Playground — and Doesn't Need to Be Colorful

What matters is opening up every possibility for growing up. Color is one of them, but not the only one.

Brightly colored kindergartens are everywhere. But Taku Hibino, the designer behind Daiichi Kindergarten in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, thinks a kindergarten that looks like a playground is not what a kindergarten should be. As he puts it, “A kindergarten is a place for growing up.”

We have written before about Daiichi Kindergarten, the one that turns into a “puddle” on rainy days and won Japan's Good Design Award in 2015. Nothing about it is flashy: a pure white building wrapped around a plain courtyard. Children treat it as a paradise, and they can play outside whether it rains, snows, or shines.

It is one of the many kindergartens Taku Hibino has designed over more than 40 years.

Hibino Design was founded in 1972. In 1991, the Japanese firm set up a department devoted to kindergarten design, called “Children's Town.” It has since built more than 350 kindergartens across Japan — a specialist in the fullest sense.

Quite a few of them have won awards, as Daiichi did. The best known is probably Obama Kindergarten in Nagasaki, which swept the 2015 Good Design Award and Kids Design Award, and then the 2016 IAI Design Award, run by the Asia Pacific Design Federation (APDF).

Inside Obama Kindergarten, a tall white space sits above wooden floors and natural-wood tables and chairs. The side facing the sea is one unbroken glass wall, so the blue sky, the clouds, and the ocean all come into the building.

Here too there are no loud colors. The places where children play look plain and natural: by climbing ropes, they can reach the roof terrace, feel the sea wind, and pass their childhood freely and happily.

Each of these kindergartens has design features drawn from its own setting, yet the same threads run through all of them. They never use rich colors, for instance, and you will not find the plastic toys common to most kindergartens.

To Taku Hibino, the firm's designer and president, these are the conditions a “growing-up environment” requires.

QDaily has covered many Hibino projects before. Here is a quick recap of what marks them out.

For building materials, Hibino insists on natural ones: wood, iron, glass. Their feel, their temperature, and their smell cannot be replaced by anything else, and children who touch them every day develop their senses without being taught.

In shaping the overall environment, Hibino avoids very bright colors and materials, and argues against leaning too heavily on air conditioning and artificial light.

Little caves are children's secret spaces, and they matter for building curiosity and the urge to explore. Adults cannot get in; children can hide there and play hide-and-seek.

Unlike the toilets in traditional school buildings, the ones Hibino designs almost always face south and have large glass windows, so wind and sunlight pass straight through.

A toilet without windows may protect children's privacy, Taku Hibino says. But a toilet full of sunlight means children are no longer so afraid of dark, damp rooms that they avoid going at all.

Eating spaces count as part of a child's upbringing too. Beyond a comfortable place to eat, the kitchen where the food is made should stay open to view, so children can watch it being cooked.

The courtyard is where children pick up experience of the world, so Hibino refuses to press safety so hard that it overprotects them. Children are allowed to “adventure” as far as they can.

You will not see gaudy plastic slides out there either. Instead, Hibino works to create drops and rises in the ground, so children build up their strength by moving.

Nothing is made of rubber or artificial turf. It is all real grass, flowers, and trees. These plants give off a natural smell, and they also bring fruit and small animals, which gives children more experience of real life.

From Hibino's first kindergarten project 44 years ago to the founding of “Children's Town” in 1991, the firm has moved at anything but speed. Fifteen years ago its work still stayed within the area around its own office, in Kanagawa Prefecture. Only about 10 years ago did its projects elsewhere in Japan, and then abroad, begin to multiply.

“We don't want to expand fast,” Taku Hibino told QDaily. “We just want to work with our clients to make good kindergarten designs.”

The pace and the manner in which Hibino builds kindergartens are tied closely to the wider state of Japanese society.

Japan's education system goes back more than 160 years. In those days national school-building laws set the terms, and local authorities put up the land, the labor, and the money.

Yet as late as the 1970s Japan was still using the postwar standard of identical reinforced-concrete school buildings. Doubts began to be heard: kindergartens, people argued, ought to have more character of their own. In 1972 Japan's first open-plan school appeared. From 1985, a “basic design fee” subsidy encouraged design firms to take part in building schools.

So across the 20-plus years since “Children's Town” was founded, Hibino Design has kept living through changes in how Japan builds its kindergartens.

Before 2015, what we call a “kindergarten” meant two different institutions in Japan: the kindergarten and the nursery. A kindergarten counts as an educational facility set up under the School Education Act, supervised by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. A nursery falls under the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and is a welfare facility built under the Child Welfare Act.

The two also differ sharply in whom they serve and what they provide. A Japanese kindergarten takes preschool children aged three and up; its standard care time is only four hours a day, and it has no duty to feed them. A nursery takes children of any age whose parents have no time to look after them, and provides eight hours of care plus meals — but to get a place, parents must prove they really cannot care for the child themselves.

The “declining birthrate” has been impossible to avoid in any discussion of Japanese society in recent years. Even so, demand for facilities for young children has not fallen: more and more women are giving up life as full-time homemakers and have no time to look after their children, and large numbers of foreigners have moved in. If anything, a shortage of teaching staff, the government's serious underestimate of how many childcare places society needs, and slow construction have left some regions with fewer facilities than demand requires — above all nurseries, demand for which has risen year after year. Out of this came the “waitlisted children” crisis that Japan has debated so widely of late. (“Waitlisted children” are children who have reached school age but cannot enroll, or must wait to enroll.)

From April 2015, to deal with the waitlisted children, the Japanese government began a policy of support for early childhood education, writing into law the “certified kindergartens” — kindergarten and nursery combined — that had already appeared in 2006. In 2015, certified kindergartens and community-based childcare programs formally entered in the statistics reached 5,250. Against that, there were 11,674 kindergartens and 23,533 nurseries, both down from the year before.

On Children's Town's website today, the work is sorted into three categories: kindergartens, nurseries, and certified kindergartens. Hibino tries to keep each design simple, not only so children get a better environment to grow up in, but so the building can answer several different needs. Outside the standard four hours of care, a kindergarten can double as a plain community center open to all sorts of people. And as kindergartens and nurseries merge, Hibino has to think harder about how to put preschool children of widely different ages in one room, and how to balance education against play.

As the projects have piled up, Hibino's work has been covered fairly widely in Chinese media in recent years. Last year the firm launched its own Chinese-language website and WeChat official account.

Lingxi, a magazine about educational architecture, held a symposium in Beijing in September 2016 on how different countries design school buildings. Taku Hibino was among the architects invited from China, Japan, and the United States. Lingxi later organized a study trip to Japan to look at kindergarten design, visiting five kindergartens and nurseries built by Hibino Design.

Those who signed up came from education, and also from architecture and real estate. Everyone on the trip, Taku Hibino recalls, was studying hard how Japan builds its facilities for young children.

As things stand, though, most kindergarten designs in China are still crowded with gaudy colors, cartoon characters, and dolls. Taku Hibino thinks this looks a lot like Japan 10 years ago.

Below is more of QDaily's conversation with Taku Hibino.

Q = QDaily

A = Taku Hibino

Q: In your view, what matters most in kindergarten design? How should safety and fun, openness and privacy, be balanced? Could you give an example?

A: The most important thing, I think, is helping children grow. As for safety, there is a view that adults should protect children, but I believe the ideal state is for children to be able to protect themselves. In other words, children should be allowed a few small injuries and setbacks. Only then can we help them build the courage to take on challenges and risks.

Q: Most people picture a kindergarten as full of color. The ones Hibino Design makes are not like that — they seem to have very little color. What is your thinking behind that?

A: A kindergarten is not an amusement park. An amusement park is a dreamlike place that makes people happy. A kindergarten is a place for growing up. That colorful approach does not take account of what children and teachers actually need. From the point of view of the people using the space, extra decoration is simply unnecessary; what they need is enough room to move. We also believe the main subject of a kindergarten is the child, not colorful decoration. To bring out that subject, a simple design works better than a complicated one — much as an art museum keeps its decor plain in order to bring out the art.

Q: Japanese society has been shifting over the past few decades — the waitlisted-children problem, the deepening decline in the birthrate. Given all that, do you think the environment for kindergarten design in Japan has changed too? What has the change looked like?

A: In fact there is a surplus of kindergarten buildings. Most of them are complicated structures their designers made as if they were works of art. But that kind of building struggles to keep up with the changes of the age.

So we design our kindergartens to be very simple, which lets them handle that change better. Many people try to predict the future, but nobody can predict it with complete certainty, and that is why a simple design is necessary. Only that way can a building cope with change.

Q: Some primary and secondary schools have started bringing digital devices like the iPad into the classroom, and electronic pets and toys aimed at very young children have appeared too. Do you think children's interests are changing as well? When you design a kindergarten, how should these products of the new era be handled?

A: It is a good thing for children to experience more, so that they have more to choose from. But growing too dependent on video games and devices from early childhood is not good. They come to know more about high technology, and at the same time they lose a great deal of natural pleasure.

Being among mountains, rivers, lakes, seas, and forests, feeling nature, sensing the warmth of life through contact with plants and animals — an electronic device can never deliver any of that.

Q: There is no shortage of fine kindergarten designs around the world. Is there one that left a deep impression on you? Why?

A: A small kindergarten in Denmark left a deep impression on me, though it no longer exists. It was only a small wooden kindergarten, with a courtyard around it planted with flowers and grass, and many spaces designed for children to “hide” in.

In a place as pleasant as that, children would often stay outdoors for most of the day, even as the weather slowly turned cold. So it turns out that what really makes children happy is not elaborate, brightly colored dolls. Cultivating their curiosity is what matters most.

Q: Among the projects you have designed, which left the deepest impression on you? Could you tell us about the design process?

A: Two of them left a deep impression: HZ Kindergarten and Nursery, and AM Kindergarten and Nursery. What the two have in common is that teachers and children alike love them.

In the design we again started from the idea that a kindergarten is an environment for children to grow up in, one that lets them take on challenges step by step. So as long as the teachers see the children smiling, they are satisfied too.

Q: I hear Children's Town has begun taking design work in China, and the welfare division has started talking to Chinese partners. Can you tell us which projects are under way? What form does the cooperation take?

A: We will not disclose details before the clients announce them.

Right now we have projects under way in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Zunyi, and other cities. Beyond that, the clients in talks with us about working together cover a wider range still, including Nanjing, Changsha, Xi'an, Shenzhen, and Guilin.

Q: In your future work with China, what problems do you expect to run into there?

A: The hardest thing is that when we are designing, we cannot see the users.

We can talk things over with the client, but during the design we also need close contact with the users; only then can we start from what they actually need and design something good. The reality in China is that from the early design work through to construction, the teachers — the users — are nowhere to be seen.

I also expect problems with the quality of work on site. Normally we stand on the construction site, confirm every stage of the project, and only then move to the next step, because that is the only way to arrive at good kindergarten design. That said, construction sites in China are now slowly becoming site-led as well.

Images: Hibino Design