May 13, 2026

Architecture, Landscape, and Community in Harmony

On a remote Japanese island, Weitzman MArch students take inspiration from a series of designs by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima.

By Matt Shaw

Alvarado and Owes render of village showing tree canopy and outdoor seating

Ricardo Alvarado and David Owe's design challenges the rigid boundaries of built space through the creation of interior gardens that grow outward through the canopy. The scheme pairs these shaded, porous environments with a renovated abandoned house that becomes a communal kitchen and workshop where daily activities spill into the street to form a continuous experience of shared outdoor spaces.

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704 Final Section Perspective by Bradley Reilhan

People walk a winding stone trail amidst boulders

water device typology diagram by Liu and Liu

Young Asian man stands over model of landscape with balloons

Ricardo Alvarado and David Owe's design challenges the rigid boundaries of built space through the creation of interior gardens that grow outward through the canopy. The scheme pairs these shaded, porous environments with a renovated abandoned house that becomes a communal kitchen and workshop where daily activities spill into the street to form a continuous experience of shared outdoor spaces.

Spencer Relihan and Jack Bradley designed a shaded canopy for an outdoor communal kitchen that reuses wood from Inujima’s abandoned houses while also redirecting wind through a tensioned scrim.

Laura Ellis and Tylor Chu's plan, Marine Life of Inujima, reimagines the island’s shoreline as a place where people can learn, gather, fish, and participate in the restoration of marine life.

Veronica Moore and Leeane Li designed Dango Iwa Sculpture Theater. Historically utilized for Inujima’s port, the site's granite boulders are repositioned into a circular formation that creates a communal space where visitors can build small stone sculptures and engage with the changing material qualities of Inujima’s granite as it reacts to water.

In Ivy Liu and Lisa Liu's scheme, sited along a waterway, three stone-based devices redirect, slow, filter, and collect water with minimal human intervention, creating new spatial relationships between plants and people.

Junxi Liu and Etta Yang's design, Undead Soul, features a series of floating balloons attached to the island's granite boulders. Here Liu works on the model in the studio at Meyerson Hall.

Famously, the trains in Japan are almost perfectly on-time, all the time.

Weitzman students traveling there during Spring 2026 Travel Week found themselves in awe of this precision, despite a few close calls. But the real destination was less exact, and certainly less urbane than Tokyo and Osaka. Located a short ferry ride from Okayama, Inujima is a small island with an ephemeral natural landscape with stone castle walls and old wooden houses dotting the hills that harken back to a simpler time.

The third-year Master of Architecture studio was led by Pritzker Prize laureate Kazuyo Sejima of Japanese design firm SANAA, and Toshihiro Oki, a former associate of the office who now has his own firm in New York. Titled Inujima 犬島 : Architecture Becomes Environment, the studio asked students to design an architectural intervention on the island, where Sejima has already designed five art pavilions, a gazebo, and the Inujima Life Garden, a renovation of a greenhouse. All are part of the Art House Project that since 2010 has made Inujima a destination for some 50,000 visitors each year.

“In the studio, we try to revitalize the island one structure at a time,” said Sejima, the Paul Philippe Cret Visiting Professor at Weitzman. “When we worked there, one project told me what I should do next.”

This light touch is central to the studio’s theme, which responds to the island’s green hillsides as well as its abandoned copper refineries and granite quarries. “Over time, one can feel the atmosphere, and another level of awareness begins to slowly appear. The island is at a size that allows an intimate comprehension. It is not too big, so changes can be felt,” according to the studio brief.

“We want to approach the project as architecture, landscape, and community harmoniously,” Oki said. “It is an ecosystem of how society comes together.”

group of people wave at camera in Japanese forest — With Sejima and Oki as their guides, Master of Architecture students traveled to Inujima as part of Weitzman's Spring 2026 Travel Week.

Sejima’s involvement at Inujima started in 2009 with the Art House Project, a series of low-rise exhibition pavilions interwoven with existing development, and led to the Inujima Life Garden project in 2015. These projects—like the Weitzman studio at Inujima—prioritize community, the island’s natural environment, and collaboration between different generations. In the years since, Sejima has been engaging a number of international organizations to become involved.

“Coming to Inujima and experiencing first-hand its intimate ecology through physical workshops is the learning method she is using for students,” Oki said. “The physical aspect creates a sense of involvement and responsibility.”

The six pairs of students interpreted this ecosystem in different ways. For Leanne Li and Veronica Moore, the landscape became a place of memory through digging long cuts into it. Stone walls marked where the intervention was teasing a new Inujima Island out of the landscape, and the history of the place. “Usually the stone is used for retaining walls. We wanted to give it life by reinventing it, reusing it, and reconfiguring it,” Li says. “We wanted to add another dimension to the rocks.”

Li and Moore were inspired by their visit to the island, where they participated in Sejima’s bamboo cutting workshops. In response, they decided mid-semester to change their design to be more delicate. “Before, we were digging into the quarry,” Moore said. “But we realized how the island feels almost sacred. The houses there are so beautiful.”

They also visited SANAA’s office, where they had a working session on their projects. “She cares a lot about the personal experience of space,” Moore said of Sejima. “She is really invested in the island and not disrupting the landscape or community there.”

Two young men beside monitor with architectural renderings on walls — Students presented their designs to the guest critics at the final review at Meyerson Hall on May 5. (Photo Eric Sucar)

For Junxi Liu and Etta Yang, memory took on a more philosophical tone than a historical one. Their project Undead Soul was a series of floating balloons, held up by helium and held down by cables attached to the island’s granite boulders.

These balloons would appear over three spaces: a large theater, a dining area, and a small sitting area. The contradiction of the floating balloons and the heavy rocks below was an analogy for life and death. “We don’t forget death, only forgetting,” Liu said. “We let the island leave in its own way. What can we leave behind?”

The jury for the final review on May 5 was filled with prominent voices from the Weitzman community and beyond, including Practice Professor Emeritus Laurie Olin, Dean Fritz Steiner, Graham Professor of Practice Marion Weiss, architect Rachaporn Choochuey, and Associate Professor of Architecture Franca Trubiano, Professor Vincent Reina (who teaches both in Weitzman and Wharton School), architect Lyndon Neri, and Jonas Elding (a former SANAA associate who ran the Inujima studio at Politecnico di Milano with Sejima for eight years).

“There is a real intensity of restraint in these projects,” Weiss said. “There is a gravity to the thinking and a noticeable intention to build less.”

“The level of craft is very advanced,” Olin said. “Compliments to the instructors.”

For Rossana Hu, Miller Professor and chair of architecture, bringing a voice to the faculty like Sejima’s is essential. “It has really pushed the students and elevated the expectations of them,” Hu said. “It lifts up beauty, the imagination, and the social dimension of architecture and landscape.”

Students' designs for Inujima are on view at Meyerson Hall as part of the 2026 Year End Show.

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