Toward a shifting inhabitation, Kaho'olawe, Hawaii

Abstract

The island of Kaho'olawe is a desert island in the Romantic sense: it is unapproachable and unsettleable, yet always an object of desire. Waterless, used for military target practice, cleaned up, and being replanted, the island requires an architecture that acknowledges and aids the continual re-making of the site. This project is an infrastructure--physical and programmatic--for connection and access to Kaho'olawe; in certain locations, the infrastructure manifests itself as architectural gestures, shelters for people who come to the island. The infrastructure is for people and plants, inscribing continual change on different scales of time and space. The architecture consciously makes and records traces, and the traces in turn are remade by subsequent visitors and rearrangements of the architecture.