After winning a fellowship from the Japan US Friendship Commission in 2010, Seattle Architect Robert Hutchison, founder of the firm by the same name, spent five months in Japan; though he had long admired Japanese architecture, this is when his relationship with the country significantly deepened. He followed this up in 2018 with a similar fellowship, this time from the UW’s Runstad School of Real Estate, focused on bringing lessons from various cultures back to Seattle’s urban plan. Hutchison’s team focused on the idea of resilience, specifically to earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis. His team visited Sendai, Japan, where a 12-meter tall wall (nearly 40 feet) has been erected to protect the area from future impacts.
Even as there is a brutalist beauty to these concrete leviathans, the downsides are obvious; The connection to the water is removed, as is the natural coastline, and they can incur serious damage to coastal species and ecosystems. Additionally, the jury is out on whether or not they work— in 2011, only a small number of the existing tsunami walls (built in the 1930s) protected the towns behind them from impact. Needless to say, when they don’t work, they become significant contributors to the damage. Jenny Suckale, an assistant professor of geophysics in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford noted in 2020: “Seawalls can not only create a false sense of security that can discourage swift evacuations,” she explained, “they can also end up breaking apart into blocks of rubble that tsunami waves then toss throughout a city.”
The imposing purpose of the walls served as a prompt to Hutchison: “How can we start looking at public infrastructure in ways that are more than just singular use? I started wondering: How can we as designers and architects begin to think more about multiple uses for these barriers? How do we accept what's been built, but think of ways in which maybe in the future, they could be converted back to public space?”
With this idea in mind, Hutchison applied for the same Fellowship he’d won in 2010— and got it. This time, as a Creative Fellow, his focus was on research. Over the course of four months, he walked “750 kilometers along the coastline with a camera. The project became documentary-through-photography, and architectural proposals that [he’s] been working on since.”
The resulting photographs are as beautifully austere as expected—in black and white, they capture the protruding scale of the wall, the ways people interact and live with it, and the places nature has slowly begun to intrude. The architectural concepts give form to some good ideas— sacrificial in nature, they don’t add any more concrete, but they offer location, remembrance, and engagement. Hutchison explores three concepts. First is the Sunrise Bridge, spanning between two tsunami walls along the Sanriku coast, marking the location of a train station that was washed away in 2011. The timber bridge spans 262 feet, with a nearly 100 foot cantilever, and takes formal inspiration from the boats and fishing vessels dotting the coastline. Then there’s a Cenotaph, imagined as a walking path enrichment for Unosumai’s 52-feet tall tsunami wall. Here, vertical cedar columns set into steel retaining piles support a lattice-work of ‘hanegi’ (corbelled) cedar members, which filter light in a way similar to the pine forests that existed along the shorelines prior to 2011. These two proposals are sensitive, smart, and defined by their context— they don’t center themselves as an object, but attempt to elevate the experience of the tsunami walls.
As any practicing Architect knows, there are limitations to working within the myriad constraints of the real world; architectural thinking has relevant applications beyond this more literal realm. Hutchison: “[Projects like these] give my firm an outlet to do things that are maybe difficult to do in everyday practice. It's all about being able to build or envision something at an architectural scale to investigate materiality and light without the constraints of having a client, budget, or codes. We love our clients, and we love the built work that we do, but it doesn't always open up deeper ways of thinking about things that our conceptual work can.”
Finally, Hutchison proposes a pair of “Sentinel” towers on the tsunami wall above the Shibitachi fishing harbor; one overlooking the water below and the other facing the village behind the wall. The pillars don’t forget site and context, but draw significantly more attention to themselves as objects. The taller tower references lighthouses with a glinting, reflective exterior and offers visitors views of the water, while the smaller tower facing inland is more introspective, with space to inhabit and listen as the shape of the structure amplifies the sounds of the sea.
Will these ever be built? That isn’t really his point. Hutchison explains: “I think it's interesting to bring some level of reality out of that presentation, to have people think: Well, this is sort of ludicrous. But this makes me think of other ways that maybe we can reconsider this relationship of public infrastructure to landscape and to community in the future.”
Hutchison plans to publish the photographs and concepts in a book, and the exhibit is moving from Mini Mart City Park to Mexico City before continuing on to Japan.
