JAPAN MEMORIAL
Memory isn't thought in isolation, nor is it exclusive to its time of conception. Rather, memory is a foundation, a catalyst, an opportunity, in which future life and activity have their roots.

In the case of Kesennuma, memory will forever saturate the lives of the townspeople. The immensity of the disaster is so great that it would be inappropriate to contain it in a reticent vestige or monument. The sheer scale of impending change and redevelopment for Kesennuma requires the use of memory to to actively shape the direction of the future of the city.

As Kesennuma focuses its efforts on rethinking the city's infrastructural and economic engines, it is clear that the most lasting and provoking elements of memory remain visible along the floodland near the harbor's edges. The brutality of the disaster is captured in formal photography in the remains of buildings that have been swept away. Each building lost was, in essence, buried in situ, rendering a vast graveyard across the coastal lands of the city. Any future development will inevitably be in direct confrontation with these remains; it is therefore imperative that this ghosted architecture manifest itself in the new city.

Memory is transformative; it is liquid, unlocatable, imperfect. Such will be the nature of the disaster memorial for Kesennuma. The memorial will begin in the present, but through time will take new form, space, and meaning. Memory also must negotiate the places in time, relating meaning of the past with that of the present. For that matter, the memorial assumes dual identities to the city's landscape: at one instance, it is a marker in time, standing against the multitude of layers awaiting Kesennuma's future cityscape, offering perspective on the city (literally and figuratively) through frames of history, conflating the ghosted sites with their contemporary infrastructures in moments of contemplation and remembrance; at the other instance, it is a seed of future dense development, with its roots in the buried forms of the past, yet consolidating to create a new image for Kesennuma, a corridor of rebuilding and unprecedented growth for a city looking to expand its place in the global picture.

This new version of Kesennuma is therefore imbued with memory in the bones of its new development, simultaneously transforming the the knowledge of what was toward the hope of what will be. Memory is both the source and method of the city's resurrection.