A few days ago we told the story of a magical place a few hours from Tokyo: KAIT plaza, an architectural construction designed by architect Junya Ishigami. Investigating her account, we discovered her work and decided to delve into her practice, which is particularly interesting and scenic. Indeed, Junya Ishigami’s architecture seems to exist in a space suspended between nature and artifice, where the landscape becomes an integral part of the architecture and the very structure of their experience. Her designs, often visionary and poetic, continually question the boundary between human construction and the natural element, transforming architecture into a living, fragile and contemplative organism.
One of the most spectacular examples of this research is the Zaishui Art Museum, opened in China’s Shandong Province. The one-kilometer-long museum, built above an artificial lake at the entrance to a new urban area in Rizhao, unfolds as a thin horizontal line running almost completely across the body of water. Rather than a traditional building, it seems to emerge directly from the lake. A regular series of slender columns rises from the water supporting a light, undulating concrete roof designed to echo the outline of the mountains in the background. Large glass surfaces have been inserted between the columns to allow visitors to observe the surrounding landscape, but the most radical choice is to deliberately leave some of the points of contact between the floor and the lake open. Water thus enters the museum, invades part of the interior spaces, and continues to flow even in winter, when the frozen surface of the lake hides the movement of the water below. In some places the roof opens to the sky, letting in light, rain and vegetation, as in KAIT Plaza. For Ishigami, the project stems from a specific reflection on contemporary Chinese architecture, which he considers too closed and defensive toward the natural environment. His intent was to create a space where interior and exterior stopped being separate.
This same tension between artifice and nature returns in the Obel Art Biotop Water Garden, created near the Nasu Mountains in Japan. More than a garden, it is a delicately constructed landscape: 318 trees surround 160 small bodies of water, creating natural micro habitats for aquatic plants and organisms. Each adult tree was manually relocated and replanted over a four-year period, after being removed from the area where the Art Biotop artist residency would be built. The result is an almost unreal space where the sky and leaves are reflected in the still water, amidst moss, stones and suspended paths. Although a deeply artificial and controlled landscape, the garden appears alive and spontaneous, destined to slowly transform over time. Designed as a place of meditation and contemplation, it is accessible to resident artists and visitors who book a guided tour.
Then in 2019 Ishigami also signed London’s famous Serpentine Pavilion, installed in Kensington Gardens in front of the Serpentine Gallery. The architect describes it as “a hill made of stones”: a large irregular roof composed of 61 tons of slate supported by a very thin steel structure and a forest of 106 seemingly randomly arranged columns. Once again, Ishigami works on the concept of landscape transformed into architecture. The slate roof, a very common element in traditional construction, is reinterpreted as a natural formation: a mountain, a rock, a bird in flight or a cloud mass. Ishigami himself recounted that he wanted to evoke images open to personal imagination, as when observing clouds looking for hidden shapes. Inside, the pavilion housed tables and seating designed by Ishigami himself, resembling lily pads resting on the ground. Here, too, the boundary between built space and landscape seemed to dissolve completely.
This poetics reaches perhaps its most extreme form in the mud house-restaurant built in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, for chef Motonori Hirata, a personal friend of the architect. The building, which is semi-hypogean and almost invisible from the street, was constructed by digging directly into the ground and pouring cement into the cavities created in the soil. Once the earth was removed, a cavernous structure of arches, organic stalagmite-like columns and irregular surfaces emerged. Initially the mud was supposed to be removed from the concrete, but Ishigami, impressed by the natural texture achieved, decided to preserve it, treating it with an ancient Japanese technique used to restore earthen walls. The result is a primal, scenic space that seems to have existed for centuries. The raw material, imperfections and natural curves give the building a feeling of weight, permanence and belonging to the landscape. Only an undulating white roof with three skylights emerges from above, hidden among trees and vegetation. The interior houses both the private residence and the restaurant. The two functions are separated by small inner courtyards, while large windows inserted between the arches allow light to filter gently into the spaces. Almost domestic and meditative details appear in the house, such as a conversation pit embedded in the floor, a kitchen carved directly into the concrete, and a bathtub integrated into the very structure of the building.
In all these projects, Ishigami seems to be pursuing the same radical idea: an architecture that does not dominate nature, but slowly allows itself to be absorbed by it, until it almost disappears, resulting in harmonious examples of the coexistence of nature and culture.
[đź“· jnyi.jp]
