Seibo Girls' School Building

An Antonin Raymond School Building of 1932

The Seibo Jogakuin School Building (聖母女学院校舎, Seibo Jogakuin Kōsha, also romanised Seibo Jogakuin Kousha) is a reinforced concrete school building in Mii-chō, Neyagawa City, Osaka Prefecture, completed in 1932 to a design by Antonin Raymond and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 May 1997, with public notification following on 29 May. Its registration number, 27-0017, comes from only the second round of registrations ever held, which places it among the earliest modern buildings in Osaka Prefecture to enter the system.

The school behind the building arrived in Japan in 1921, when seven sisters of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers were sent from France. Seibo Jogakuin opened in 1923 in the Tamatsukuri district of Osaka, in what is now Chūō Ward. The campus there proved too small. Keihan Electric Railway was developing residential land around Kōrien at the time, and the school moved in February 1932 onto the site of a former amusement park sports ground in Mii, then part of Tomoroki Village in Kitakawachi District. A primary school opened on the same grounds that April.

The building that went up for the move is the one now on the register. It is reinforced concrete, two storeys above ground with a basement below, and covers 3,233 square metres. A third floor was added later. A convent was originally housed inside it; today the interior serves as classrooms, a library and administrative offices. The school became coeducational in 2017 and now operates as Kōri Nevers Gakuin.

Why the Plan Matters More Than the Façade

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion covering works that set a standard in design. What earned that judgement was the arrangement of the floor plan rather than any single elegant detail.

Seen from above, the building reads as the letter E: a long spine corridor with wings projecting from it at intervals. Japanese architectural writing calls this a finger plan, and the point of it is light and air. A classroom in a deep, blocky building gets daylight from one side and stale air everywhere. Push the classrooms out onto narrow wings and each one takes daylight on two sides and cross-ventilates without mechanical help. In the Japanese climate, where June and July turn humid enough to matter, that is a functional decision with a public health argument behind it. Neyagawa City's cultural properties office notes that the interiors were laid out with daylight specifically in mind. The 1932 building is an early Japanese example of the type.

The exterior carries a different set of ideas. Raymond mostly stripped the elevations of ornament and shadow-catching relief, working in flat white planes, right angles and horizontals, which is the vocabulary Japanese modernism was adopting at the time. The main entrance breaks that rule. It is fronted by a colonnade in a Spanish idiom, and the column capitals are Composite, the Roman order that stacks Ionic volutes onto Corinthian acanthus. A modernist would normally have no use for either. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out this combination as the design feature of the building, and it is what makes the front elevation memorable: a Catholic girls' school in the Osaka suburbs, wearing a Mediterranean porch on a modernist body.

Raymond himself was born in 1888 in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary and later Czechoslovakia, and studied architecture in Prague before emigrating to the United States. He joined Frank Lloyd Wright's office and came to Japan in 1919 as chief draftsman for the old Imperial Hotel, then set up independently in Tokyo. The Soviet embassy and the Tokyo Golf Club are among his other prewar works. He died in 1976. The Neyagawa building was constructed by Takenaka Corporation; the contract is dated 3 December 1931.

A Building Still in Use, and a Recent Discovery

Something unusual happened here in November 2020. Staff going through a storeroom opened a wooden wicker chest and found 69 blueprints along with the Takenaka contract. More material kept surfacing, including correspondence with Raymond's office and letters exchanged with Keihan Electric Railway about the electrical supply. Over 300 items were recovered. Buildings of this age in Japan very often lack their original drawings, lost to fire, war or simple discard, and the recovery gave researchers a documentary basis for reading the design that had not existed when the registration was granted in 1997.

The building was later selected by DOCOMOMO Japan for its list of modern movement architecture in Japan, an assessment that took the rediscovered archive into account.

Practical information matters here more than usual, because this is a working school rather than a museum. There are no visiting hours, no admission charge and no interior tour on offer to the general public. The campus operates with a guard post, and anyone with business at the school is asked to check in there on arrival; unannounced sightseeing visits are not what the school is set up for. Alumni association events have occasionally opened the building for viewing, so an approach through the school in advance is the realistic route for anyone with a serious architectural interest. From outside, portions of the elevations can be seen from the surrounding streets. Kōrien Station on the Keihan Main Line is about ten minutes on foot; the same line will take you into central Osaka in roughly half an hour, which makes this an easy detour on a modern architecture itinerary that already includes Raymond's Kansai work.