Location: O'ahu, Hawaii HALE KAI'A
Area: 1.72 Acres
Year: 2022
We are in a world where resources and information (knowledge) is uneven within different groups of people and region. In other words, being in a state of imbalance; living justice and social justice should be a challenge that we all need to be aware of and attempt to address.
As an island in the archipelago, Oahu is confronting an 80% - 90% import rate on food and goods and is also short on worker housing and resources such as potable water. With our partner, Ko Hana Rum, we as a studio defined several major constraints that we would like to tackle throughout the project.
-Build on an unbuildable land
-Leveraging infrastructure as a tectonic for different types of buildings
-Recycling and gathering to keep self-sufficient
Please check the Studio Intro and Big Ideas in the attached source files for more information.
Hale Kai'a (Terrace island) is 1.72 acres of unfarmable land at the frontier of Ko-Hana, being unfarmable because of the slope and the lack of minerals within the soil. To make it farmable once more, treatments such as terracing the land and replanting were synthesized in our design.
Being at the edge, Terrace island was also given an isolated spot of the “in-betweens”. From the perspective of view, it’s in between ocean and mountain; from the perspective of the farm, it is between the farmable and unfarmable, as for the perspective of workers we are hoping for a balance of working and living.
We create different moments to frame the in-betweens in several languages. The sugarcane field became natural walls to frame a poetic event space, volcanic rocks of the volcanic island grew up from the soil and framed the views of the ocean and mountains. Once you move past the ruins, there stand the vessels, containing the living of life, which is just as isolated and peaceful as our land is.
For full document please check the Hale Kaia studio book in the attach source files.
