Shimizusawa Power Plant

The image looks across a stretch of the Yubari River to the old pump house and the brick mass of the Shimizusawa Thermal Power Plant beyond. The pump house is the shorter of the two structures, sitting low on the riverbank where it drew the water that cooled the plant's turbines. Behind it the plant's render-and-brickwork buildings rise against the Hokkaido pines, chimneys and rooflines holding the shape they were in when the operation closed. A thin spillway runs out from the base of the plant into the river. The whole composition reads like an architectural drawing. Three buildings, a road, the river, the pines.

Shimizusawa was built in 1926 by Hokutan, the coal company that controlled most of Yubari. For decades the plant burned local coal to power the mines that fed it and the town that grew up around them. Yubari was a coal city, and Shimizusawa was its furnace. As the seams thinned and the mines closed one by one, the plant lost its purpose. By the time the last pit shut, there was nothing left to power. Operations ended in 1991. The pump house and the river it drew from are still there, doing nothing in particular but standing.