The “smallest botanical garden in Japan” refers to the Shibuya City Botanical Garden Fureai.

As 15 years had passed since its opening and the facility had begun to deteriorate, a renovation was undertaken to create a place that promotes local production for local consumption, as well as forming a community hub unique to Shibuya. We focused on the condition of having a “small space” and started to think positively about what can be achieved with this, aiming to create a participatory botanical garden, unlike the traditional “viewing botanical gardens” that use vast spaces for plant observation.

This garden would explore new ways of interaction and proximity between nature and people, made possible by the small scale.

To make the larger themes of creating a sustainable society and a regional hub for agriculture and food more approachable, we blended these ideas with various concepts such as a café, restaurant, shop, library, theater, farm, and hydroponic cultivation room. This fusion of agriculture and food was designed to provide tangible, accessible experiences. Visitors can learn about the seasonality of vegetables through activities like sowing seeds, watering plants, and observing the process from flowers blooming to fruits ripening. The vegetable scraps from the food produced turn into fertilizer, providing nutrients for the next plants to grow.

This is an urban botanical garden designed for growing and eating plants, offering city dwellers an immersive experience in the cycles of nature that supermarket-bought vegetables cannot convey.

Several issues needed to be addressed to realize this plan, particularly with the existing facility. These included creating new pathways and circulation from the first floor to the second, increasing the area of soil available for planting, and improving sunlight exposure. In the previous layout, tropical plants were grown with supplemental nutrients to compensate for the lack of sunlight, but this method was unsuitable for growing edible vegetables due to pest problems.

Vegetables require direct sunlight, so we devised the idea of creating “mushroom-shaped” mounds, raising the ground to increase the soil surface area and ensure adequate sunlight, while also making the garden more enjoyable by allowing visitors to stroll through and climb these small hills.

These elements, combined with the existing structure using curved forms, create a dynamic, natural landscape where colors and shapes blend harmoniously, making the entire space resemble fertile soil. The five mushroom-shaped mounds, crafted with layered cork and processed with five-axis machining to form rounded, organic shapes, function as floors, roofs, stairs, and tables. By mixing different scales, we aimed to evoke the wonder of nature, allowing visitors to experience the macro and micro worlds of the natural environment.