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emDear Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda,/em

emOver 560 sq. km of northeast Japan was inundated by the tsunami that followed the massive March 11 earthquake, leaving over 20,000 dead or missing and devastating farmland, ports and nearly the whole regional fishing economy. The subsequent shutdown of most nuclear power plants, part of Japan’s highly centralized power generation system, caused an unprecedented energy crisis with severe repercussions for the national and even parts of the global economy./em

emThe aftershocks have sent tremors far beyond the areas directly hit by the natural disaster. But the widely accepted notion of a triple disaster of the earthquake, ensuing tsunami and nuclear crisis is a misconception, obscuring the fact that the afflicted areas had already been suffering from deep structural problems for decades./em

emA comparison of the current crisis to the Great Hanshin Earthquake throws the demographics of these problems into stark relief. The 1995 quake primarily struck Kobe, a single densely populated city of 1.5 million inhabitants where 13.5 percent of residents were aged 65 or older; the Great East Japan Earthquake hit hundreds of kilometers of coastline in mostly rural regions with a population of nearly 7 million, 22 percent of whom were older than 65./em

emBy March 11, 2011, many younger people had already left Tohoku to study or work in Tokyo, creating a demographic imbalance where the share of elderly had risen above the national average, eroding the region’s economic base. Accordingly, agriculture, fisheries and forestry face succession issues and a shortage of labor, with the result that the country’s food self-sufficiency is on the wane while carbon dioxide emissions from increasing food imports are aggravating global warming. Large-scale shopping malls, mushrooming in rural Japan, have sapped the last energies of retail districts in existing town centers. These are manifestations of the lingering attraction of energy-intensive, car-centered lifestyles, whose resulting urban development patterns have left the old and immobile isolated in dilapidated, atrophying downtowns./em

emA comprehensive, long-term strategy is needed to help solve these and other demographic, social, environmental and economic problems that were already in place prior to March 11./em

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we found a place that is becoming more and more rare in tokyo as the city continues to modernise – an old wooden house at the back of a narrow lane.  currently a tea shop inhabits the ground floor and we are on the second.  Apparently the floor was used at some point as an actual living space, but has been empty for awhile.  As living spaces go it was probably quite alright, but as an office space it needed some work as the floor plan was composed of a series of rather small rooms divided by a stairway that has not been used for at least a decade.

luckily we were given permission to do as we like with the premises and so we decided to remove all of the walls, fill in the stairs, and keep only the structure.  We now have a pretty decent space for making models and enough desk space for everyone to sit down.  This is all a very nice luxury that I hope will be the norm from now on. It is definitely a bit different kind of space but the location can’t be beat and the mix of old and new make for a nice place to work in the 21st century.

if you are in the neighbourhood don’t hesitate to drop by.  In the meantime here are some before, during and after images of the new digs.

entrance

before

demolishing walls

with the walls removed the small rooms give enough floor space to put in a desk

structure and floor are painted with waterproofing paint

note how the work desk accommodates the columns – we’re very clever that way

i know the world is small.

the reason i know this is because even a wee office such as we have thrown together is published in way too many languages.  I guess we always expected our work might be published in English magazines, and most of what we have written or been featured in, fits that category. But surprisingly a lot of it doesn’t.

It all started with the Russian version of Interni, and expanded to include Korean (Details and C3), and Dutch (Starchitects book) publications, and finally last year we also made into the Japanese press (this was not an easy thing to do, even though we are based in Japan).  Just this week we received our copy of a book on small houses that is written in Chinese and English featuring two of our projects.

Now, I am happily the first to admit it is incomprehensibly surreal to see our work in so many languages, especially since we are often set alongside such amazing people.  In this latest book for example we are there with UN Studio.  Absolutely makes us feel we need to work harder (at the very least).

The thing that I can’t help wondering is why we find ourselves so accidentally international, especially since we are so decidedly local in our practice, at least so far.   After all it isn’t like we sent our work to all of these publishers.  To the contrary they always come to us.  My theory is that we are picked up in so many languages because of the internet and the blogosphere. It’s kind of like word of mouth, but everyone has their eyes closed

The upshot is that somehow our projects end up relayed all over the place, from the UK to India, the USA and China, without any apparent awareness that national boundaries even exist.  It really does seem like the world is growing flatter and smaller.  Would be nice if that meant we could move into those markets more easily too, though I somehow doubt it works that way. иконииконописikoni