archunderworld: 2011

What, exactly, has Tadao Ando been up to lately? Apart from a chapel he designed for the Château La Coste vineyard/starchitect petting zoo in the south of France, a water fountain he installed in Mayfair, London this past summer, and a curious collaboration with Tom Ford for the fashion designer/auteur’sBarragan-style Santa Fe Ranch, much of Ando’s recent work has not been widely-published or circulated. But over the past couple of years, Ando has been promoting what may prove his most ambitious and visionary project, the creation of a new forest in Tokyo Bay. Continue reading.

Dubbed the “Sea Forest” (“Umi no Mori“), the project will plant half a million trees over an area of 88 hectares of reclaimed land in the middle of the bay. As Asahi Shimbun reports, the land, an island actually, had been used in the 1980s to process and soil garbage disposal collected from Tokyo’s 12.3 million tons of household waste over a period of fifteen years. Ando’s forest will rise from the 30-meter thick subsoil of compacted trash, covered by a surface layer of grass and leaf compost.

thanks to: ARCHITIZER