100-Day Exhibition: Labor, Robots, and Corridors

Abstract

This thesis proposes a weird, giant, and cycling memorial spectacle with the introduction of a new sort of labor in the format of a 100-day exhibition. The robotic machines replaced the enslaved persons to run a closed system of deconstruction and reconstruction: a constant displacement of architectural productions. The whole island is a museum. The exhibition is a constantly work-in-progress construction.

LABORS Hashima Island was a self-sufficient company town run by Mitsubishi. While being approved as a World Heritage Site as part of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution, it is also a site of forced labor before and during World War II. In 1974, the mines were closed, the island became a ghost town.

ROBOTS Compared to human labor, robotic labor is highly efficient, emotionless, and precise. It is good at copy & paste and making mistakes perfectly without knowing it. To make a contrast between human labor’s logic and the programmed robots’ logic, asking the robots to repeat the perfect flaws to build the structural modules is the core constructive method for this exhibition.

CORRIDORS The corridor is not only circulation and servant space. It should be considered as an organizational device for facilitating public interaction while maintaining a divider for separating the private and public at the same time. The corridor wants to be a room as well. In this thesis, the “new” serves as the XL corridor filled in the interstitial spaces between the existing residential buildings. The cluster of buildings becomes a single building with a matrix of connected modules and non-typical corridors.