We drove to see Sejima Kazuyo’s Aizuma Lifelong Learning Centre in Toyota-shi from Nagoya.

Along the way, colourful billboards visually call out for your attention and large glass commerical buildings boldly show you what’s inside.

Sejima’s is a small building along a minor road. Here the local community come to learn cooking, read or study at its little library, attend seminars, see small-scale exhibitions or gather at its hall for occasional performances and events. You recognise it at once. It looks a lot like a Sejima building you say. But lets look at what it does.

You can easily walk around the spaces between the circular rooms in an endless array of paths.

Walking around, you imagine you can look into rooms of activities, and vice versa.

Sometimes you look down into other rooms from an upper level.

On the third level it becomes a roof terrace, open to the elements. The walkaround at every level feels different.

At times the path becomes so narrow that you have to walk sideways to get through.

Sometimes you are gently prevented from going around.

But usually, nothing tries to distract you too much from the smoothness of your movement or your activities.

Even outside.

In the library, if you need a little more privacy, there are screens of metal mesh, and plants eventually.

Or curtains.

And if you need to keep out noise, there is another layer of glass.

Each floor slides over the other slightly to make the building look less bulky and a bit more closer to you.

All this makes it sound so effortless, but it is not. There is a lot of effort to make this a simple casual building for a local community, without being too fastidious about things.