Kamaishi Project

Client

Kyoto Seika University

Year

2019

A memorial promenade connecting eight architectural interventions through a water spine, from the mountains to the sea of Kamaishi.

Overview

Memorial Flow is an architectural graduation project developed in 2019 at Kyoto Seika University (Takamatsu Studio), set in Kamaishi-Unosumai, a coastal city in the Tohoku region of Japan devastated by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. The project proposes a series of eight architectural interventions — ateliers, a waterfall, a gate, a park, an observatory and more — all connected by a single linear water element threading through the city from the hills down to the sea. More than a memorial, it is conceived as a living promenade that invites artists, residents, and visitors to return, dwell, and rebuild a relationship with a place marked by trauma.

Client

Kyoto Seika University

Industry

Illustration

Service

Territorial project

Architecture

Model Making

Duration

8 Months

The Challenge

The challenge was to design architecture that could hold grief and memory without freezing the city in its loss — and to do so in a place where the landscape itself, mountain and sea, is both the source of beauty and of catastrophe.

The Solution

The project organizes itself around a single unifying concept: a water rill — calm, continuous, and fluid — that flows through the entire urban promenade as a physical embodiment of memory. From its origin in mountain artist ateliers (Montagn'Arts), it passes through a tiered waterfall, a pair of split granite boulders evoking the force of water, an outdoor gate echoing the tsunami's height, an existing memorial park, a children's miracle park, and finally an elevated crescent-shaped observatory overlooking the sea. Each intervention translates the same poetic idea — space as relationship — into a different architectural register, scaling from landscape to structure to architecture as the water descends toward the coast.

The Result

The project was presented as a full architectural booklet, bilingual in English and Japanese, encompassing site analysis, conceptual writing, hand-drawn perspectives, section diagrams, and design plates for all eight interventions. Developed during an international exchange at Kyoto Seika University, it received the support of the studio's teaching team and stands as a formative exploration of the role architecture can play in collective mourning, community revival, and the transformation of trauma into a shared living landscape.