Robert Hutchison is a practitioner, researcher, and educator whose interests and practice overlap the fields of architecture, art and photography. Hutchison is Principal of the Seattle-based architecture studio Robert Hutchison Architecture, and an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. He is the recipient of numerous honors and fellowships, including a 2017 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a 2022 MacDowell Fellowship, a 2024 Loghaven Fellowship, a 2010 and 2021 Japan/US Friendship Creative Artists Fellowship, and the 2009 Emerging Voices awarded by The Architectural League of NY. 
 

Abstract: 

‘Memory Landscapes’ is a conceptual project exploring the power of collective memory in designing for certain futures resulting from natural disaster. Focusing on two distant yet interconnected regions—eastern coastal Japan, devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and rural coastal communities in the U.S.’s Pacific Northwest, which are reckoning with inevitable similar events—the project considers how lessons learned in the act of remembrance in one community can inform the process of future construction in another. Through a close photographic study of existing sociological, geological, and constructed conditions, ‘Memory Landscapes’ proposes a series of parafictional architectural proposals for emergency infrastructure in coastal communities facing inevitable disaster. Hutchison’s research in Japan in 2023 as a U.S./Japan Creative Fellow established the foundation for the design portion of the project. The project was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Seattle's Mini Mart City Park gallery, with a book publication in progress.