Shin Egashira - Before Object, After Image: Koshirakura Landscape 1996-2006

Lecture date: 2006-10-26 Lecture by Shin Egashira to accompany an AA exhibition and book that documents the accumulation of direct creative responses to a post-agricultural community in a time of transition. While teaching at the AA, architect/artist Egashira set up in 1996 a field workshop in Koshirakura in the Japanese province of Niigata. Some 200 km north of Tokyo in a mountainous region with overgrown forests and abundant rice fields, the area is still recovering from an earthquake in 2004. Every summer the workshop replaced the absence of children at the village school with the new architectural residents. With over 160 workshop participants from about 40 different nationalities, Koshirakura is perhaps Japan’s most international, independent village. The local population continues to experience rural migration. Egashira’s desire to contribute to the Koshirakura community through the application of architectural knowledge and by making buildings as continuous forms of communication