Come watch the documentary series Islands and Villages presented on the front lawn of the CCA on Thursday 21 June, at 9 p.m. The films were made as part of our new international initiative, CCA c/o Tokyo, which launches on the same day in Tokyo.

Islands and Villages documents the posturban phenomenon in rural Japan. What happens to a discipline so bound up with the city when the city is exhausted as a field of possibility? Jolted by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and frustrated by a lack of opportunities to shape urban development, architects in Japan have begun to look beyond the metropolis to reinvent their practice. The trajectories, scale, and content of their engagement vary. Yet there is a common effort to define a new form of exchange between architects and communities, one that supplants the traditional system of commissioning.

CCA c/o is a series of temporary initiatives that are locally anchored in different cities worldwide, a tool to reveal issues of general relevance that emerge from different contexts than our own, a strategy for defining new thematic explorations and adding new perspectives to ongoing conversations, and an experiment in transforming the CCA itself.