Kamocho Monomi Timber Commons

Kamocho Monomi, Tsuyama-shi, Okayama Prefecture, 35°14'15.5"N 134°06'44.1"E

As stated in the introduction, each site chosen for this thesis exemplifies ways in which local communities are working to slow down the predicted population loss. The following design proposals are provocations, as opposed to technical resolutions, that build on these existing efforts.

Travel Log – June 20, 2019

Mimasaki, Okayama

The workshop smells like cedar and earth. Large bushels of rough, wood strips line the old wooden walls. We’re making dye from cedar bark, soaking the pieces in large metal vats. A sweet-smelling steam is rising from the brew. 

Ami and her partner renovated this house is on a quiet, Edo-era street, meaning many of the buildings are around three hundred years old. While many of the houses and storefronts are empty, a number of them have slowly been re-occupied by other artists and families. Ami explains that Okayama Prefecture provides subsidies to young families, alleviating a significant portion of living costs to promote migration to rural areas.  

Ami separates the hot dye from the boiled cedar pieces. She then slips a piece of cotton cloth into the brew to let it steep. After some time, she removes it from the dye, wrings it tightly and unrolls a soft pin, cedar hue. 

The community of Kamocho Village and its surrounding region in Tsuyama, Okayama is trying to change the way residents think about trees. Local people have forgotten how to make things with them, how to cut them, and how to manage them. Fifty years ago, excess trees were planted to meet the supply demands of commercial construction. But when the number of forestry workers gradually declined, the forest became unmaintained, the tree canopy grew to be too thick, and this led to a number of other problems. The ecosystem of the forest floor changed, causing plant species to die. As a result, the deer population that relied on the plants began roaming the villages, destroying crops, and getting caught in fences. Houses with thatched roofs that are built with traditional wood joinery fell into disrepair as the number of trained carpenters dwindled. 

I met a number of younger families while on my site visit in Kamocho. Ami is part of a small wave of artists that settled in the region, taking advantage of the surplus of abandoned houses for studio space. Originally from the region, she worked at a corporate textile company before deciding that she wanted the freedom to make her own work and to raise her children in her hometown. As illustrated in Part 3, Ami is an example of a rural resident with multiple outputs of work: designing her own textiles, growing her own vegetables, running a guesthouse, teaching dyeing classes, and selling local goods in her gallery space. Ami makes dyes out of many kinds of natural ingredients, such as citrus fruits, flowers and other plants, but focuses her workshops on the using cedar trees.“This colour is specific to this place. I want everyone who visits the workshop and makes something here to remember that.”

Kamocho Monomi Timber Commons re-inhabits a haikō situated in a valley, next to the Kamo River. It’s a more recent build; the exterior paint seems fresh and an addition has been recently made to the gymnasium building. The village fabric that surrounds it is relatively lively. The school is adjacent to a retirement home that is expectedly full, and a popular tofu restaurant is located nearby. There is an abandoned timber yard up the road. Timber Commons is proposed as an outpost space for art and design schools in Tsuyama, Okayama and the Kansai Metropolitan area, the most accessible urban areas from Kamocho. The project posits that through creating a creative hub focused on the use of local timber, adjacent forestry-related enterprises would follow, such as tree nurseries, a re-occupation of the vacant timber yard, shops, galleries and guesthouses. 

Similar to Sado Rice Village, the Timber Commons incorporates the lifting and removal of roofs. A strip of public programs is inserted, which require higher floor-to-ceiling height than the existing building. The public zone is extended across the topographic change in the site, bridging the two existing structures. The public program consists of an archive, an onsen, a community irori, kitchen, makerspace and lecture hall. The rest of the school building’s classrooms would be converted into live-work spaces for artists, designers and students. The project, like the Rice Village, focuses on incorporating the flows and presence of local materials into the organization and architecture. 

The archive is a proposed collection of educational materials relating to forestry and timber processing. The baths, in addition to offering a new social and public amenity, are designed using similar materials to the baths of the traditional houses of the region, many of which still use firewood to heat the water. The irori, or community fire, is a larger reproduction of the smaller irori in vernacular rural dwellings. While the use of irori are typically limited to traditional farmhouses and restaurants, its placement in the building imagines a new space for sharing food, conversation and knowledge. Both the irori and the kitchen respond to a culture of sharing homegrown vegetables and rice in Kamocho.

  The large, pitched roofs of the building echo the farmhouses and function as chimneys for the programs emitting steam and smoke. The roofs are proposed to be constructed from local cedar, and they connect to a public, timber walkway that provides access to the different programs. The walkway also provides views down into the main workspace, previously the school gymnasium. The main workspace is dedicated to different scales of woodcraft and carpentry, occupied with shop equipment and fabrication labs. A textile and garment studio sit above, where offcuts and waste material from the cedar wood produced in the wood shop would be processed. The opaque back wall of the gymnasium would be converted to glass, opening a view of the river and mountainous landscape.