Permission To Live

Stephen Phelan first visited Onagawa in the aftermath of the Japanese Tsunami in 2011. He has visited the town several times since and charted the struggle to rebuild after the destruction. Here he looks at redevelopment of the town through the prism of temporary housing by the Pritzker Prize winning architect Shigeru Ban and how this might inform the future.


World / Building is a series of essays exploring how contemporary architecture informs the world. And how the world informs it. It is also a platform for architectural critics to explore in depth their craft through a building that explores this conundrum. It asks the obvious question, "what should architecture do?" and the less obvious one: “how should it be judged?”