Communal Firewood Oven

Next to the 300 years old cherry tree, at the corner of the school entrance, stands a new communal size wood burning oven. It was built following our belief that food brings people together. A truck full of sandstones,…

mansuke house

Mansuke House is a 250 years old farmhouse. The owner  “Mansuke” offered this house for the Workshop with the hope for its creative re-utilization as the family decided to move out to the city. The house survived a…

roof over the shrine

Reorganising the workshop after the closure of Kawanishi Town Hall became our agenda in autumn 2005, when Koshirakura as a village expressed its wish to continue the workshop. The most obvious possibility was to approach the city government for…

festival vehicles

On 23 October 2004 the Niigata earthquake, registering seven on the Richter scale, shook the entire district of Uonuma.The aftershocks continued for several weeks, and were followed by unusually heavy snowfall in November. Koshirakura village was cut off from

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real fiction

There are some folk stories that have been told for generations in Koshirakura.‘A Monkey Passed’ is the story of a single father who once lived in the village with three daughters. A monkey offered to help him one harvest season,…

viewing platform

At the end of the Maple Tree Festival the god returns to the sky, leaving behind the tree that carried him through the village. In the past the tree would be recycled as firewood for the winter. Nowadays, with less…

temporary structure

The initial project was an experiment in staging narratives. Each team created its own scenario, sequence and spatial setup to accommodate a short story about two people meeting in various locations around the village. Six teams made six rooms for…

additional space

We began by identifying the absent volumes of winter snow as rooms in the summer landscape, individually mapping the volumes by placing our bodies within them. As we walked and uncovered these concealed spaces, our excursions became a modified game

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slow box afterimage

Project for Tsumari Art Triennal 2000/03

In 2000 there was the first international art triennial in Tsumari District made up of seven towns and cities including Kawanishi Town. When the director Fram Kitagawa of Art Front Gallery invited me to

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watermelon place

As a complement to the Bus Shelter extension, which is a winter facility, the team decided to build a cooling place for the summer season. Diagonally across the street from the Bus Shelter is an unused pond for spring water.…

extension (shared facilities)

In Koshirakura there appears to be no clear line that divides communal and private places, no material borders that define and organise the community as a whole. When paying a visit to the villagers, it is common to walk straight

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azumaya

The Azumaya (summer pavilion, arbour) is the archetype of the traditional garden hut – a refuge from the sun and the rain, a covered space rather than an enclosed interior. Traditional rules govern these small buildings. They should have no…

slow window and overpass

Setting out new textural plans over the preliminary layer and positions inscribed during the previous year, the second phase of the land work began by shifting surplus earth from the excavation of the foundations of Azumaya.  The materials provided…

communal park

The theme for 1998 was ‘the body in play with the environment’.The prefectural government of Niigata had initiated a plan for regenerating the grounds of the abandoned school by turning them into a communal park.The Kawanishi administration wished to revise

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bus shelter

How big is the village? Where does it begin and end? The size of the village on the official map must be very different from the size of the landscape created in people’s minds. These landscapes cannot be measured in…

reading chairs

The workshop began with a reading of the landscape based on its textural details. By extracting geomorphological codes we were able to see the direct link between the forms of the land and the forms of its inhabitation and cultivation…