Leaving Shore

The site of the project are the waters outside of the Oshika Peninsula in northern Japan, and its users are the inhabitants of the surrounding fishing villages. The project contains a school, extensive oyster processing facilities, a nurse's office, and a communal canteen. The placement, afloat in the bay, aims to intervene into the nearby fishing villages' complex relationship to the sea, a relationship devastated by the 3.11 tsunami. The project, utilising the unifying potential of the oyster farming industry, acts to conjoin these disparate settlements through their combined industrial agency at sea. Socially, the villages are further unified through the provision of a school, providing a civic and industrial merger of programmes for the shared benefit of these isolated communities.