Umi No Mori Island in Tokyo Bay has been the primary landfill site for all of Tokyo for the past few decades. However, the island is now full and a decision is being made about how to use the land after the closure of the landfill. Many in Tokyo would like the island to be covered over with vegetation and turned into a pristine natural landscape, concealing—forgetting—the garbage beneath.
This project argues that simply covering over the refuse will never be enough to turn this repulsive landscape into the natural landscape Tokyo desires. Utilizing similar strategies already implemented on the site and in other similar landfill reclamation projects—the introduction of foreign plant species, creation of a green landscape, and introduction of pedestrian circulation and community space—the project reverses many of the cities desires for the site: instead of a perfect, natural blanket of vegetation, the landscape becomes a gnarled and aggressive surface of invasive plants tangled with the garbage underneath. The two become one homogonous landscape, making it impossible to separate the natural from the artificial.
Situated within this rugged landscape, aggressive landforms bring the garbage out of the surface, creating an overgrown reminder of what lies beneath. Throughout the site, visitors encounter these landforms sometimes unexpectedly and are confronted face-to-face with the reality of the site and of the crisis that this garbage has created on a global scale.
Visitors circulate through the landscape on a sunken level beneath the surface of the island within perfectly crafted concrete pathways and plazas. The forms of these concrete spaces is extracted from infrastructural ghosts of Tokyo city—silhouettes of major rail stations and highway interchanges that appear on the map of the city creating a link between these spaces and the infrastructural process and past of the site. These concrete pathways sometimes terminate in framed views of the landscape, bringing them uncomfortably close to the refuse that is the reality of the site.
These three elements—the concrete spaces, the gnarled landscape, and the landforms made of garbage—create a reminder of the processes that created the island. Visitors are forced to see and experience the magnitude of the garbage present, created by them.
