Thirty years, two continents and two natural disasters separate one from each other.
It was 1960 when the
Japanese metabolist Kisho Kurokawa designed an agricultural town in
Aichi Prefecture, with the intention of replacing the agricultural settlements in
Ise Bay that were razed the previous year by
Typhoon Vera. A seemingly utopian project which aspired to solve the classical contraposition between city and countryside by integrating agricultural production into an urban structure. The city was made up of multiple communities. Each one of them located on a squared concrete platform, about 300 meters to 500 meters by side, elevated on
pilotis, about 4 meters off the ground, to deal with future flooding. This platform was both a structure and an infrastructure, thus reserving all soil for agricultural production. Each community, subdivided by a grid of 25 blocks and 100 meters by side, housed a population of about 2,000 inhabitants. The central block was reserved for public facilities such as an elementary school, a shrine and a temple. The remaining blocks were where the housing of these new settlements was located.
Simultaneously to Kurokawa's project, the Moroccan city of
Agadir was destroyed by an
earthquake, despite its moderate magnitude of 5.7 on the
Richter scale. After this earthquake, it was rebuilt, about two kilometers to the south, as the typical post-Corbusierian new town. And it is from this tabula rasa where thirty years later, the form of this project, with clear metabolic reminiscences, designed by the Dutch architect
Rem Koolhaas and his
Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) arises. The project is a single building divided into two parts: a socle, which takes the sinuous shapes of the surrounding dunes; and a roof, which takes the form of a cloud. The socle is where the convention center is located, with auditoriums, conference rooms, etc. And the roof is occupied by a large hotel. The remaining in-between space, supported by a forest of
pilotis, becomes a huge concrete covered plaza open to the beach and the vastness of the ocean.
