Founded in 1996 by architect and artist Shin Egashira, the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop has been bringing architecture students to a remote rural village in Northern Japan for three weeks every summer. Students become temporary residents of the Koshirakura community, living and working in a former primary school building, which closed in 1994 due to too few schoolchildren. Koshirakura is one of the many post-agricultural communities slowly diminishing in its presence from the scenery of rural Japan, whose landscape can be seen as the shadow of urban growth over the last century. The students spend time understanding and participating in village life, whilst using locally available materials to explore tactile architectural forms. Previous projects have consisted of a communal kitchen, the rebuild of a local bus shelter, and an observatory built from reused material, with the help of local skills, songs, food, and sake. Although the individual built structures are small in scale, the 25 year history of the workshop can be seen as a single ongoing project, with a much broader influence of contemporary architectural practice.
Chloë Leen & Theo Molloy are directors of Pup, an architecture practice that creates characterful projects that are unique, materially driven and environmentally conscious. Their work is focused on bringing a positive impact to communities, individuals and organisations through the quality of their projects. https://www.puparchitects.com
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