Makino's Roadside Station / Wakatake Town Planning Research Institute + STUDIO YY + WORKSTATION

Located in Sakawa, Kochi Prefecture — the birthplace of Tomitaro Makino, the father of Japanese botany — this roadside station (Michi-no-Eki) was selected through an open proposal competition. To honor the legacy of Dr. Makino, whose name the facility bears, we set aside the given conditions and started from zero, driven by a single ambition: to draw out the full beauty of the natural landscape that Makino himself cherished in Sakawa. The town's mayor, who served on the jury, later remarked that our proposal had appeared in his dreams — a testament to how deeply the design was rooted in the spirit of Sakawa.