postcrisis reconstruction agency 🇯🇵
kadk 09.2015 - 05.2016
震災復興機関 東松島市
The Postcrisis Reconstruction Agency is an architectural response to the critical mismanagement of aid money that poured into Japan after the 2011 tsunami. As a political entity, the Agency intervenes in the institutional vacuum, or ‘state of exception’ witnessed prior to the remobilisation of political infrastructure in the aftermath of urban trauma. It acts upon physical matter to re-code the dominant economic mechanisms that proliferate in this condition to realign urban reconstruction with the needs of victims.
The project was developed in response to a 6 week research period in Higashimatsushima during 2015. It aimed to interrogate why 80% of the annual rebuilding budget bounced back to Tokyo unspent while citizens remained in emergency accommodation. Rather than providing a unitary addition to a physical plot, the Agency adopts a site in the digital realm of financial transactions to divert abstract commodities into physical spatial devices.
The Agency combines the operations of credit union and developer to offer communities affected by catastrophe a greater stake in the rebuilding process. This concept was developed into a robust business model in collaboration with CBS Copenhagen. The visual production explores the Agency in motion, acting and reacting with the Kotobuchicho neighborhood of Higashimatsushima as it becomes a laboratory for an alternate construction ecology.
Read the thesis program
higashimatsushima was one of the worst affected cities in the 2011 tsunami
the postcrisis reconstruction agency is an active system in the city
The Postcrisis Reconstruction Agency was developed through both written and visual architectural techniques working in parallel. It is an experiment in design method in that the text aims to unfold what the drawings cannot and vice versa.
The written element, captured here into four research clusters, explicates key threads running through the design process and drove project development. The text aims to further the discussion by gathering intricacies of case studies and insights from journalistic research method while siting project explorations within a constellation of contemporary theoretical discussion.
Archinomics in the Age of Risk
02_Urban Idealism
Rise of the Metabolists
03_Untimely Object
Political Architectures
04_Institutional Rhetoric
Bank as Typology
For further information about the project, including details of the business model, visit the Agency online >
View the project on the KADK website >
vault operations 1.50
