Thinking big in the devastated Sendai Plain

When the 2011 tsunami that followed the Tohoku Earthquake hit the coast of Japan, Sendai Plain, an approximately fifty square kilometer area between the city of Sendai and the Pacific Coast, was almost entirely devastated. Only few buildings, among them a school that had been designated as an evacuation zone, withstood the force of the wave. The resulting tabula rasa prompted a group of four architects, Kengo Kuma, Yusuke Obuchi, Jesse Reiser, and Nanako Umemoto, to set up Japan Studio 2012 around the idea of thinking of ways to redesign Sendai Plain, all the while knowing that the question isn’t whether another tsunami will hit the region, but when.

Professor Nanako Umemoto is spending one semester at ENAC’s School of Architecture as visiting professor, joining us from New York City where she is partner at RUR Architecture. The fifteen ENAC master’s students she is supervising have been involved in Japan Studio 2012 since the beginning of the semester. Recently they were given the opportunity to visit Japan to participate in the midterm review meeting of the program. During the event hosted by the University of Tokyo, they joined architects from the other participating schools (Princeton University, California College of the Arts, Hong Kong University, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Osaka Sangyo University, Tokyo University) to exchange ideas and proposals that had been developed at each school until then. Studio Japan’s final review meeting will be held at Princeton University, at the end of the semester.

The trip to Japan was short, but the students took full advantage of every waking hour. “We only had a short time to visit Sendai, the Sendai Plain, and Tokyo, so we slept 3 hours a night to get as much as possible out of each day,” says Boris Popma, one of the students who went on the trip. The whistle stop tour of the region included outings in Tokyo to see traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, and one day was dedicated to studying the consequences of seismic events and trying to grasp the scale of the destruction caused by the 2011 tsunami.

That day, organized by the city of Sendai and Tohoku University, the students first attended lectures on the science of tsunamis and earthquakes, and their consequences on urban planning and architecture. And then it was time to shift gears, leaving behind the classroom to see the traces left behind by the 2011 tsunami. Wearing respirators, the students took a bus tour to four sites in Sendai Plain: a sewage treatment plant, a garbage incineration site, the school that had stood fast before the wall of water, and a small hill, sixteen meters above sea-level, where five people and one dog found refuge during the tragedy. “Visiting the sites really gave us an idea of the force and the impact of the tsunami,” recalls Popma.

According to Popma, the trip was an eye-opening experience that brought him into close contact with an, until then, completely alien culture. Interacting with the other students and professors involved in Japan Studio 2012 was very enriching, and the architectural sites visited were inspiring. But most of all, the challenge of thinking about how to redesign Sendai Plain was formidable. “We were encouraged to look at nature and the possibilities to use natural features in our design proposals,” says Popma, “and to dare to think big.”