March 15, 2011. The scenes from Miyagi and Iwate, along Japan’s northeastern coast, are staggering. Seventy thousand buildings swept away.
Yet in each town, there is a 4- or 5-story concrete building standing on a slightly raised body of land, above the receding waters: hospitals and schools, surrounded by green space that prevented catastrophic fires from spreading to these critical structures. These public buildings were intended not only for their primary function, but also to do what they are doing as I write: they shelter nearly half a million refugees made homeless by Japan’s mind-boggling series of disasters.
It is interesting to compare those sites to the spots where more recent infrastructure was so casually located. Sendai Airport, for example, was very close to the coast, in an area without any walls to slow a tsunami, and with, it would appear, little rise of the land on which it was built. At some point in the last few decades, Japanese planners and politicians stopped seeing the infrastructure of public architecture as shelter. Most of the buildings safeguarding so many today are a part of Japan’s postwar legacy, completed more than four decades ago.
The nation that built those schools and hospitals still recalled the war. They knew the importance of a few strong structures to shield society in its worst moments.
But what of the future?
In Nagoya, two days after the earthquake hit (but before very much of the nuclear disaster had begun to unfold), voters handed the biggest wins to the “No Tax” party led by the city’s Mayor Takashi Kawamura. After these wins were announced, Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan, sensitive to the message, declared that he intended to initiate a “New Deal” reconstruction—without raising taxes. It is hard to be optimistic that today’s architects and engineers in Japan will be able to leave a legacy of strong public structures to shelter others in the future, in light of that announcement. And the buildings from the 1970s will not be there to play that role again. Those structures, in spite of the fact that they withstood so much, no longer comply with today’s safety expectations. And it would be far more expensive to retrofit than to replace them.
And what of us?
In California, we cannot look to schools to shelter us in a seismic event. A study in 2002 raised concerns regarding the safety of more than 6,000 schools out of 7,657 in Seismic Zone 4—but little was done under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to assure California’s communities, or its children, that these structures would safely harbor us if our homes were lost in a similar disaster. Hospitals offer greater optimism: a law passed in 1994 required hospitals to be seismically upgraded by 2013. But, hospitals, reeling from the recession, convinced the California legislature to push back that deadline, to 2020 at the earliest and in some cases to 2030.
This is, frankly, pennywise and pound-foolish, a reflection of an era when private good trumps public goods. But, if we are lucky, it will only reflect the moment in which I write on March 15, 2011, and not the tenor of the times in which these words are read. There is clearly much work to be done.
Author Dana Buntrock has been investigating Japanese construction practices for over two decades and teaching the basics of construction practices at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly a dozen years. She requests that you update your earthquake kit if you didn’t already. She may be reached at danab@berkeley.edu.
Originally published 1st quarter 2011, in arcCA 11.1, “Valuing the AIA.”
