Ethereal Experiments
Poetic, experimental, surreal, nature-inspired. Any of these words could be used to describe the work of Japanese architect Junya Ishigami. We profiled Ishigami in 2019 when he was announced as the winner of the prestigious Serpentine Pavilion commission
Poetic, experimental, surreal, nature- inspired. Any of these words could be used to describe the work of Japanese architect Junya Ishigami — be it a transparent workshop filled with a forest of white columns, a cloud- inspired nursery interior or a soft-edged subterranean complex.
‘For me, it’s important to understand that the process of creating a new building and creating a new environment are the same,’ says Ishigami. ‘My goal is to create as much architectural diversity as possible, to reflect the whole spectrum of values shared by humanity.’
A glimpse into this breadth of vision will be on display for all to see this summer, when one of Ishigami’s highest-profile projects to date is unveiled in the heart of London: the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens.
Ishigami is the 17th in a string of pre-eminent architects ( Jean Nouvel, Sou Fujimoto, and Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei among them) who have won the prestigious commission to design the temporary pavilion, brought to life every summer on the lawn in front of the Serpentine Galleries.
Tapping into his ‘free space’ philosophy, Ishigami’s early renderings depict a pavilion of ethereal contradictions: a canopy of slate — delicate despite its weighty density — in shades of stormy sky greys, complete with a peaceful cave-like sanctuary beneath it. His design combines perspectives of the built environment with the natural landscape, resulting in an organic form that appears to levitate despite its heft.
It’s this experimental compulsion to balance the primal patterns of nature with man-made edifices — often to poetic or fairy-tale effect — for which Ishigami is increasingly famed.
The Kanagawa-born architect has been carving out his unique creative vision since he founded junya.ishigami+associates in Tokyo in 2004, after four years with sanaa. Among Ishigami’s earliest commissions — and one that immediately turned heads — was the serene and sunlight-drenched kait Workshop. Completed in 2008 at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, the glass-walled space is complete with a ‘forest’ of white ‘trees’ that is actually an assemblage of more than 300 slim, angular steel columns of varying sizes.
That same year, Ishigami’s profile rose further with his Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture: another near- transparent creation that blurred the edges between nature and architecture. Two years later he won a Golden Lion award for best project at the same event, for a study that built on his previous transparent works to represent ‘architecture as air’ through a barely existent model of thin carbon fibre.
More recent highlights fusing architecture and nature include the dreamlike Water Garden. The outdoor botanical feature at Art Biotop, a creative retreat in the forests of Tochigi Prefecture, represents Ishigami’s approach to a new form of habitat created by informed intervention. The architect also received critical acclaim for a major solo exhibition titled Freeing Architecture, held at Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2018, and was awarded a prize for opening new vistas in fine arts by the Japanese government in early 2019.
Looking ahead, Ishigami has a string of global projects in the pipeline, ranging from the otherworldly House of Peace in Copenhagen to the soaring and monolithic Chapel of the Valley inside a mountain ravine in China’s Shandong province; both represent the continuation of his unique vision.
Text / Danielle Demetriou
