IBARAKI, JAPAN

This studio will explore the design of a family of Low-Cost Carrier Airports. We will be looking at Ibaraki International Airport, which comprises a link in a chain of airports spread throughout Asia in Japan, China and Taiwan.  Located Northeast of Narita and still further removed from metropolitan Tokyo, the situation of Ibaraki suggests an alternate set of architectural consequences for the contemporary airport. The utopian or dystopian effects are simply more pure because unlike in traditional places there is no history, no resistance - material, cultural or otherwise - to resist it. We will explore another set of possible futures for the architecture of the airport. Eluding both th returnist and the nihilist models, we will consider projects that, while steering very close to groundlessness, may be redeemed in their shameles embrance of the artificial and the synthetic.