Park for Post Industrial Meditation

Potemkin stands as a post industrial temple, the Acropolis to re-think of the connection between the modern man and nature. It is a cultivated junk yard situated between the ancient rice fields and the river with a straight axis to the Shinto temple. The Potemkin is an artistically articulated collage of recycled urban and industrial waste, an industrial ruin for post-industrial meditation. The wall system is framing a set of old oak trees and a series of outdoor and indoor spaces, smaller temples and courtyards with the final focus on the river down in the valley. River, where you may fish your ayu-fish, grill it and eat it up in Potemkin and go home. The rice farming village of Kuramata is dying. Local Knowledge of hundreds of years are about to disappear very rapidly; traditions that are based on a harmonious co-existence between the man and nature. Urban visitors are often sleeping in Potemkin and they are writing to the architect that they slept good.