Hiroshi Ohno - YTAA 2020 Asia Shortlist

Reconstruct of habits and techniques in the local life

Tacloban was attacked by typhoon in 2013 and tsunami swallowed poor living area. Goverment has banned to live and planed to relocate residents. It is progressing but the new land is no place to work or communicate. My project is an actual project to rebuild the places of residents lives by themselves.

The typhoon and tsunami swallowed poor living area and they were ordered by goverment to relocate as no-living area. But they had nowhere to go, not long after the disaster, began to rebuild the living space that had been swept away. Four years passed, the coastal town has regained the life before the disaster. At the same time, the residents began to move to the village government constructed with concrete far from the city. This village is a newly built village with 1,000 households that has been carved out of the mountains. I lived both area to experience local life as architects by having their meal, sleeping their house. In the life spend there, migration area got material wealth but they lost mental wealth.

The site of the project is in a village called "NHV"built in a resettlement area. The government can barely provide housing for the village and there is no infrastructure for living. Even though it's planed to build eight public facilities, lack of cost and technicians cause delays of construction. Residents who used to create their own towns have become passive, having been given houses by the government, and have no intention of creating their own towns. The project began when a resident told me that there was no place to talk about the community. I designed a bamboo chapel on this site expected to function as a community center and serve as a catalyst for community development. This chapel was made of the materials around the village and used the technique of the furniture craftsman and shipbuilding skills fishermen in Tacloban. The structure is made of bamboo and we have transferred the Tacloban technique to architecture. We have applied Japanese wood joinery technology to the bamboo furniture craftsmen's bamboo joinery technology. Then we desined the columns and horizontal beam of the chapel. In the fishing town of Tacloban, local fishermen burn and bend the bamboos that attach to boats.This technique was applied to make a roof beam made of a single piece of bamboo to make a tuned beam strings structure. We repeated tests with them in order to incorporate their technology into the architecture. They are low-income people in this area, and converting their skills to building will improve their lives. As I tested the materials, I realized that the ideas of the coastal residents, who had created their own lives by devising various ways of doing things, were better than those of the architects. By building this church with local materials and techniques together with the residents, this church will be integrated into the lives of the residents. I negotiated with the government to let me use the surplus land to build a house. The budget is only about $3,000. It can only be made by the people of the city. It's strong enough to withstand a typhoon.