Coral Regeneration Platform Section

Coral Frontiers is a proposal designed by Rosa Rogina at the Royal College of Art in London for a new infrastructure for coral regeneration on the Island of Diego Garcia. It is also a geo-political intervention into a unique entanglement of military, human rights, and environmental stakes. The project explores how could an architectural proposal result in a shift in the balance of power that has crystallised in this remote island, and support the resettlement of the exiled community of its native inhabitants, the Chagossians. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll and British territory in the Indian Ocean that from 1966 operates as the biggest US military base outside the States. For this spatial anomaly to happen, one whole nation had to be brutally ‘swept and sanitised’ and lost one of their fundamental human rights – the right of abode in their homeland. Still today, 40 years after their forced displacement, the majority of the 5000 Chagossians in exile are actively campaigning for their right to return.

Today is a crucial time to examine the island. By the end of 2016, the 50 year-long UK lease of Diego Garcia will expire. This project explores a speculative scenario in which, due to pressure by the international community and human rights institutions, the Chagossian return to their homeland is one of the conditions for the US lease of the island to be extended. In order to avoid reproducing, through architecture, the colonial schema that first led to their forced displacement, the project doesn’t impose a design solution for the resettled community. Instead, this project is a proposal for their first means of survival – the infrastructure that may sustain their resettlement. Just like it uses the fragility of the coral as both a weaponry and a line of defense, this project attempts to turn vulnerability into a force, and to challenge the defeatist assumptions that a small exiled community would always has to bend to the will of powerful governments.

Masterplan

Model

Island Cartography