An essay written by Chloë Leen for The Architectural Review.
On one of the verdant slopes surrounding Koshirakura, an incongruous hulking concrete building with many windows peers over the valley below. The structure is simultaneously a monument to the village’s population decline and its optimistic outlook. Once a school, it was closed in 1994 due to the lack of schoolchildren. Like rural communities globally, low profitability of farming has led to high levels of economic emigration. Here, the diaspora of youth has resulted in a reduced and ageing population.
Following the school’s closure, the community maintained the building, determined to give it a positive communal use. Meanwhile, local government had been looking for ways to address the floundering rural economy. Plans to develop the school into a tourist resort were rejected; and strategies to attract businesses to the region failed. It is part of a global question: how can these communities be sustained?
An alternative arrived in the summer of 1996, when Shin Egashira – architect, artist and unit-leader at the Architectural Association – proposed a Landscape Workshop, which despite its risks won regeneration funding. The school became a temporary home to around 25 architecture students studying the region. This number of international participants has since come for three weeks each year.
This is an extract from the piece written by Chloë Leen for the Architectural Review's Reinventing The Rural edition published in April 2018.