JUNYA ISHIGAMI. How small? How vast? How archItecture grows?

How small? how bIg? Junya IshIgamI’s growIng archItecture

An architect who studies clouds. Who probes the mystery of the water- drops in the air that coalesce to form cumulus clouds and thereby defy the laws of gravity. Clouds as buildings, or at the very least aiming for architecture that’s as a light as a cloud. An architect who arranges the columns in a building like a starry sky, so that people can make places for themselves in ever-changing constellations like the signs of the zodiac. Nature is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami. Not only to open a window onto the living beauty of nature and natural processes, but above all to transpose the hidden primal forces of nature into architecture.

The fact that Junya Ishigami immerses himself deep in physics and thermodynamics to understand how clouds defy gravity is enough to show that he is an exceptional architect. He is also exceptional because his work displays a great sensitivity to man’s inner child, and to childlike wonder. Entering Ishigami’s architecture is like entering the world of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

For Ishigami, architecture is, after all, one great experiment. Poet and scientist come together in his architecture, and a childlike imagination is never far off, as in ‘House of the Rain’ and ‘House of the Wind’. Or else he makes spaces in the form of clouds: ‘It’s incredible fun to find inspiration for new spaces and buildings in the shapes of clouds.’ There are plenty of projects like this. A small house with a view of a lake that migrating birds descend on every spring. A restaurant on a mountaintop. ‘The setting of a building defines its character much more than the personality of the building itself.’ A small weekend house in town, where moving between the rooms and the garden evokes the sense of a small forest. ‘The project contemplates new ways of incorporating nature into the city.’

These are just a few of the many projects in which Ishigami calls on nature as an image, a metaphor or a process so as to arrive at a new form of contemporary architecture. He is constantly in search of new horizons, sometimes in the most literal sense. For example, when he wonders how architecture gives tangible shape to space, he finds his inspiration in landscapes. Especially in the way the landscape is shaped by the horizon and the contour lines that appear between the land and the sky, or the sea and the sky. ‘If we want to explore new horizons,’ he explains, ‘we have to think about the shape of the planet itself.’

Ishigami is able to vigorously employ this examination of the planet, this ‘cosmic’ view of nature, in buildings that resonate with nature at several levels. Take for example the workspace at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT) near Tokyo. It is a building without walls. The outer shell is in glass, and the space has a virtual boundary of trees, impressive rows of Japanese cherries. The structure of the building consists of 305 columns. Literally a forest of steel rods. Each column is a solid rectangular- section rod. Each one has its own size and proportions, meticulously calculated on the basis of the load presented by the roof. Frighteningly slender too, seemingly contrary to all the rules of statics. But Ishigami developed an ingenious system together with an engineer. During con- struction, the building was subjected to such a load that the columns star- ted to bend in the way they would under the weight of the building plus the extra weight of snow on the roof. When the load was removed all 305 columns sprung upright once again, so that now the whole building is under traction rather than under pressure. This brilliant idea means the struc- ture has an unprecedented slenderness, and is so light that it thoroughly defies gravity. But this building also literally shifts boundaries in terms of space. The space unfolds like a wood between the 305 columns, which look as if they have been planted on the more or less square floor-plan of 200 sqm. Just as in a wood, you encounter open and closed spots depen- ding on the position and density of the columns. But the image Ishigami had in mind was not so much the easy metaphor of the wood, but rather the allegory of a starry sky. Just as people see/make up constellations in the sky completely arbitrarily, at the KAIT they can organise their space freely amongst the randomly positioned columns. Workspaces can grow or shrink. In this building, growth, the most obvious metaphor of nature, is interpreted in an astonishing way.

Incorporating nature into architecture. Enabling architecture to breathe nature in and out, as it were. The radical way Ishigami redraws architec- ture by relating it to nature is not just a new fashion or trend. It puts him fundamentally at the heart of the Japanese animist tradition in which mountains are sacred, and where in autumn the flowering cherry trees and maples form the highlight of the year. But Ishigami is also able to elevate this to an abstract level. As an engineer-architect he is able to shift the technical limits of what a building is capable of.

Junya Ishigami (1974) made his international breakthrough while relatively young, at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale. He set up a singular installation of glasshouses around the Japanese pavilion to subtly change its surroundings. He developed several constructions in glass and steel, assisted and inspired by the botanist Hideaki Ohba. Here too it is in the first place the slenderness of the steel structure that is striking. But Ishigami was above all concerned with creating a special climate for the plants. Ohba told him that an increase in temperature of 2 to 3 degrees can make an enormous difference to the sorts of plants that grow. The combination of greenhouse plants and randomly assem- bled wooden furniture thoroughly transformed the garden around the Japanese pavilion into a place where people could rediscover nature like children.

Radically innovative, though thoroughly rooted in tradition, Junya Ishigami embodies the paradox of modern Japanese culture, where nature is cul- ture and culture is driven forward by nature. Ishigami can in fact be seen as the heir to a ‘dynasty’ of architects that goes back through Kazuyo Sejima (1956) and Toyo Ito (1941) to the meta- bolist architect Kiyonori Kikutake (1928-2011). But what makes Ishigami exceptional is his linkage of poetry to technical innovation. It is he more than anyone who is seeking an architecture that shifts constructional boundaries and switches from statics to a new sort of dynamics.

The exhibition shows about fifty projects, from small-scale interventions the size of glass bottles with flowers in, to utopian plans with cities as landscapes, and a mountain as a theatre (or is it a theatre as a mountain?). Ishigami sometimes presents his utopias with the naivety of a children’s drawing. Not only is this disarming, but at the same time it powerfully evokes his humanist attitude, his pursuit of architecture that upgrades everyday life. When, in ‘Forest and City’, he proposes filling a neighbour- hood with trees, enough to transform an urban landscape into a wood, he is simultaneously suggesting a move towards more compact habitation. At the same time, in his ‘Bath Studies’, he raises the question of how we can make everyday life ‘more comfortable’. Not in terms of gratuitous comfort, but with the following fundamental question in mind: ‘Should architecture from now on explore new ways of life?’

In concrete terms this takes the form of his view of the terraced house. By designing the terraced house more narrowly, Ishigami frees up space. He roofs over this ‘slice of nature’ as he calls it, this garden, with glass so that an indoor-outdoor climate arises. He withdraws the house itself, minimally, into a sort of vertical piece of furniture, so that each room is almost by definition part of the surrounding ‘garden’. According to Junya Ishigami, living with the garden, with nature, creates the conditions for a more full and fulfilling lifestyle.

This focus on and care for nature, the desire to create space for nature’s marvellous, complex processes, is expressed in almost all the works in the exhibition.

By consistently taking nature as the metaphysical foundation for his archi- tecture, and by meticulously developing this into both real and utopian projects, Junya Ishigami has in just a few years not only carried out fundamental research, but at the same time has also shown the way to a possible architecture for the future.

Txt.- Koen van synghel