Festival (フェスティバル)

Festival is a shopping complex designed by Tadao Ando along the main street of Naha, on Okinawa, in the far south of Japan, whose climate is closer to that of Southeast Asia than to the rest of the country. The devastating effects of the Second World War were still felt there: the project set out to lay down guidelines for the rehabilitation and development of the city. Its central idea is a three-dimensional promenade that links the building to the city and creates an interior plaza on several levels.

Renovated in 1996, the building reopened as Naha OPA. OPA pulled out in 2013, and Don Quijote opened a store there on 28 November of that year. An album of presentation drawings of the building, made around 1985, was given by Ando to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 1997.

As Ando designed it, the building is a cube 36 m on each side, bounded by walls that mark the edges of the plot. Its structure is a uniform grid of reinforced concrete over eight levels, filled with solid concrete blocks or perforated screens of the same material. Inside, a large central void extends from the ground to the top level; it takes up a fifth of the width of the cube and runs from the main facade to the back of the site. The three-dimensional promenade unfolds around the periphery and gives access to the shops on every level.

The perforated concrete-block screens are used only where the interior has to be separated from the exterior. They give the facade a strong contrast between solid and void while controlling wind and light: ventilation and air conditioning pass through this screen, so that one could say the building breathes. The top two levels form an open patio, softened by a pergola. At ground level, on pilotis, building and street overlap: the shade of the void invites pedestrians to shelter there from the sun and shows them the escalators up to the higher floors.

From the first sketches the idea was to cover the top level with natural vegetation; Ficus retusa had been chosen, among local species, for its ample foliage and fast growth.

Originally shops occupied every level, from the basement to the top, together with offices, a meeting room, a car park and patios. The building now houses a Don Quijote store.

Occupied by a Don Quijote store, the building can be entered like any other shop.