The Possibility of an Island

Andres Camacho (MArch ’19)

Who would build the island? Would it be the Mitsubishi Group? The company who was complicit in the exploitation of labor, land, and extraction of coal in Hashima Island in 1890? Who would then leave abandoned and forgotten its workers and land, once coal proved to be obsolete? Would they seek a new image? Hashima Island could turn into Mitsubishi’s testing ground for reinvention of the obsolete; inverting the relationship between architecture of extraction to one of production, giving life to the forgotten and unwanted.