Rina Miyake

In the Green Reincarnation, I designed a “future” where people coexist with forest as post world of forest greenwashing by companies. Nowadays, it is easy to find greenwashing advertisements everywhere. In this project, I especially focused on the Old-growth Forest at the Yakushima Island.

Many people claim not to cut down trees for a sustainable future, and which seems sustainable at a glance. However, these are actually greenwashing. Japan stops cutting down trees since 1945 and currently, there are many overcrowded old-growth forests in Japan. This resulted in blocking sunlight to the ground and making young trees difficult to grow, and also cause land sliding and more CO2 emitted from the dead trees and wildfire.
In my designed space, people coexist with the forest and appropriately control the area with the slow speed of the forest lifecycle, by cutting some of the trees to make enough spaces for young trees growing.

Building raises up in the sky by the pillars can minimize the impact on the ground environment for the trees as well as by the skywalk. Also there is no need of the road on the ground by using recent transportation technology such as “Drone”.
There are holes in the platform for many live trees to grow freely without cutting. Community floor located between ground and 2nd housing floor where people meet and communicate each other. Skywalk to another buildings is connected to this community floor. There is also an internal skywalk at the center of the building which connects other side of community floor. There are 4 houses on each floor with each stair connected to the community floor.

Material used for the design is mainly wood from the island to utilize the cut down trees and minimize the co2 emission by not importing trees from the other places. Large full covered glass is used for the window to make people feel they are part of the forest and aware of the importance of the forest.

Yakushima Island is not just the specific site for this design, but the design is also applicable for the Japan main island’s major part of forest area, and also other world forest areas and could be Post-Forest Greenwashing. Near future people can live spread out to more spacious forest area from the overcrowded city area as the cohabitant model. “Coexist with Forest and Slow Sustainable Control” is the concept of this project.