Studies a community along the Tohoku Pacific coastline to learn how to build and live in an increasingly perilous world haunted by natural disasters.

Memory Landscapes introduces a conceptual project by Seattle-based architect and educator Robert Hutchinson that explores the power of collective memory in designing for new futures following natural disaster. Focusing on eastern coastal Japan, which was devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it examines how lessons learned through the act of remembrance can inform future constructions of public space that instill joy and build connection.

Government-built infrastructure in the form of massive seawalls, constructed along the Tohoku coastline as a safeguard against future events, severs local communities from the landscapes that hold them. Through a detailed photographic study of existing sociological, geological, and constructed conditions of the region, Memory Landscapes offers a series of parafictional proposals for these coastal communities that would reconnect this severance and co-opt the seawalls as a form of restitution of public space. The book combines Hutchison’s own photographs and architectural proposals with interviews and contributions from Japanese architects and artists as well as community members from Tohoku. Their work and experiences address memory, material, and community in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Robert Hutchison is principal of Robert Hutchison Architecture based in Seattle, WA. He also teaches as an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where he directs architectural design studios.