Moé Atsumeda

Originally from Japan, Moé Atsumeda was awarded her Bachelors's from the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her professional practice in design has ranged from working in architectural practice, exhibition, installations, and graphic design, working in Japan, Singapore, and London.

In Moé’s personal practice, she investigates architecture through an interdisciplinary lens and attempted to converge her interests in film, contemporary culture, and speculative design to address how language and semiotics of the built environment and urban environment affect human and social conditions attempting to craft a nuisance understanding of the profession.

Cities, growing as a confluence of labour and production, can be said to be a process of surplus product, mobilised under the framework of needing to produce, to generate more surplus value. The city grows from the perpetual need for profit. If, as in the case of Japan where this project is situated, labour is rapidly declining, new migrant labour needs to be introduced in order for the city to maintain its growth. What this project understands as Japan’s shadow economy. The project looks toward the growing migrant community within this capitalist economy, finding itself within the small town of Asagaya within Tokyo, neighbouring Suginami Ward.

Refuge in-between tremors aims to navigate the complex process of spatial transformation occurring within Japan, their “host country” and their home country to which one’s identity is intricately tied to. Refuge in-between tremors utilises and crafts a deep sensibility with the shared trauma of earthquakes in order to craft legality for the Nepali migrants attempting to find security within their new home without a stable visa. The project questions whether object materiality and a sacred sensibility towards earthquakes can shape the cityscape for migrant communities.

The project constructs a language from the violent and visceral tremors of earthquakes and works to memorialise and find aesthetic culture in earthquake prevention, safety and measuring equipment. Developing a merged language, understanding Earthquakes as a warning from gods angered at the sins and greed of the people. Aiming to craft throughout an intricate kindship with the body, nature and the sacred spirituality within the project. Evoking through its spatial characteristics, a connecting point for both Nepalese and Japanese alike. A refuge, in-between the cityscape if you will. A refuge outside of politics, and of nature. The project details an empathetic language to craft a point of respite within a foreign, unforgiving city.

Entrance to the Refuge in-between Tremors – Antique seismometer forms are used as monuments for the Garden entrance, shaking and swaying with the wind and with the vibrations of tremors. Obeying the rules of Buddhist temples, the entrance beacons you into the sacred garden through its embedded iconography.

The Seismometer Garden – The Garden acts, two-fold, celebrating and reminding the citizens of the dynamics of the quakes, and the technology that has helps stabilize the built structures. Earthquake dampers and transparency, lights, and fabrics, are designed into the corridors to euphemize the tremors, celebrating the object materiality. The instability within the corridor, highlights the power and beauty of the quakes, creating a sacred experience.

The architecture enhances the connection to the ground, channelled by the immersion of myth-making, Presenting a political and natural refuge within the city, for both Japanese and Nepalese citizens. The earthquake is treated as a god, worshipped through the structure, as the Nepalese have learnt to understand the tremors. Practising the treatment given to Buddhist temples, in the mythology to host a relationship between, nature, space and God.

Building Plan 1:100 - Showcasing the building in motion during tremors. Showing the public earthquake research institute, a residential garden and a growing residential block. The conflict of the earthquake creates space for both Nepalese and Japanese researchers to exist in an architecture that extends its foundations throughout Japan. Transforming the site into a significant centre of aid that holds space for a true merged identity developed by the Nepalese community in Japan.

Corridor at Rest – The sleeping bags embedded within the space denote a commonly bonded respite. Spatially carving out a space of safety within the common anxiety of an always nearing earthquake. The sleeping blankets placed within the connecting spaces between the garden and the public museum cum study.

Corridor as A Breather During Moments of Crisis – The sleeping bags are utilised after an earthquake as the corridor turns into a shelter. The corridor and the research centre transform into an emergency shelter, with the corridor becoming a space for a breather.

The residents play and work in the domesticity of the garden, yet the garden is continuously monitoring, holding its own with the relationship with the ground that we inhabit. The garden pushes the residents to practice habitually, through the architecture, the rituals of worshipping the earth and heeding the warning of the quakes. Through the significance of materiality, the Mitsumata leaves extracted from Nepal through Nepali labour, partakes in the production of sacrality in the quakes.

Continuously, the playground measures the ground levels to monitor and test theories on earthquake movements. The quiet humming of the machines lulling the families of the residents to sleep, an almost protective sound.

The Temple hosts a symmetrical view of the garden, followed by the precedents set by Buddhist temples in Japan and a sacred spatial experience both in times of tranquillity and times of disaster for the neighbourhood. Each space honouring the ways in which Nepalese utilise space, layered, multi-functional and respectful of nature.

A celebration in transition, the grace of the dampers. – A transitory space that moves through from the institute to the garden. The normally hidden high damping rubber is monumentalized and given stature and the significance that prompts the damping rubber to an aesthetic object.

Entrance to the Earthquake Research Institute

The entrance to the public earthquake research building architecturally honours the tremors, the roof structure following the form of a seismograph, and objects of earthquakes displayed dually with Nepalese cultural artefacts both with a shared a sense of fragility and significance for the public to be immersed in.

The research and care on the earthquakes, and subconsciously of Nepali culture and care, through its position within the city and empathetic existence within a harsh Tokyo cityscape, passes down to the neighbours a spatial right to the city for the Nepali community. Crafting a sense of legality within the community and a form of protection.

Site Map: Asagaya Suginami-ku

Site Map: Asagaya

The project examines and looks towards the legal conditions in which the Nepali diaspora are moving to Japan in, examining the effect impermanence and a loss of statehood have on memory, and future formations of memory and of home-making.

For the Nepali diaspora, Japan’s popularity as a migrant destination has seen an increase since the 1990s, when the Technical Intern Training Program was introduced, making Japan the largest South Asian community of Nepali migrants. The training program attracted foreign workers to settle in Japan. Tokyo saw Asagaya morphing into Little Nepal, In building this community, Nepalis entered Japan with the status of the short-term visitors, Thus many found jobs, that are part of the shadow economy, jobs known in Japanese as the three-ks.

Kitanai, Kiken and Kitsui,

Dirty, Dangerous and Difficult.

Moé Atsumeda

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Royal College of Art