JUNYA ISHIGAMI and MAKS win the contest for Park Groot Vijversburg

Junya Ishigami, was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, in 1974. He studied at the Musashi Institute of Technology from 1994 to 1998 and subsequently completed his education at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he studied between 1998 and 2000. After graduating, he worked for Kazuyo Sejima + Associates (SANAA) from 2000 to 2004. That same year, he founded his own architectural practice, Junya Ishigami + Associates.

Throughout his career, Ishigami has questioned conventional understandings of architecture. His approach allows him to work beyond prevailing trends, established principles and traditional definitions, creating new structures and spaces and proposing alternative ways of organizing the environment. Through his projects, he seeks to radically transform the lifestyles associated with modern architecture and enrich them with new values.

His early projects include Table, created in Tokyo in 2005, and T Project, which received first prize in a residential architecture competition sponsored by the Tokyo Electric Power Company that same year. These were followed by Balloon in Tokyo in 2007, the Kanagawa Institute of Technology KAIT Workshop in Kanagawa in 2008, and the Yohji Yamamoto Gansevoort Street Store in New York in 2008. Other significant works include the Japanese Pavilion for the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, Art Biotop Water Garden in Tochigi in 2018, the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2019, KAIT Plaza in Kanagawa in 2020, House & Restaurant in Ube in 2022 and the Zaishui Art Museum in Rizhao, China, completed in 2023.

Ishigami’s work has received considerable international recognition. In 2004, Low Chair and Round Table were acquired by the Centre Pompidou. In 2005, he received the SD Prize for Small Garden of a Row House, the Kirin Prize for Table and first prize in the residential architecture competition for T Project. In 2006, Table was presented by Gallery Koyanagi at Art Basel and was later acquired by the Israel Museum. He subsequently received the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize for KAIT Workshop in 2009, the Golden Lion for Best Project at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, the OBEL Award for Art Biotop Water Garden in 2019 and the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in 2024.

MAKS is a Rotterdam based studio for architectural designs, strategies and research. It was founded by Marieke Kums in 2009. With an international network of collaborators, the studio is involved in building design and realization and urban planning.

The studio develops projects that engage culture and consciousness, nature and artificiality, surrealism and pragmatism. MAKS strives to go beyond conventional values and scales, as the range of people’s awareness is ever expanding in an age where it’s possible to find out about almost anything in the world in an instant. MAKS’s projects vary from small art installations, to concept studies for the Dutch Museum of National History and renewal projects in the Netherlands and abroad.

Marieke Kums studied at the MIT in Boston and at Delft University of Technology from which she received her MSc Arch degree cum laude. Between 2003 and 2005 she worked with OMA / Rem Koolhaas and from 2006 to 2009 with SANAA / Kazuyo Sejima & Ruye Nishizawa in Tokyo. For SANAA she was in charge of several projects, including a project for the VITRA campus in Weil am Rhein, a museum for Serralves in Porto, and (cultural) masterplans in Dubai and Hong Kong.

Marieke has been invited as a lecturer and guest critic at several universities around the world, such as Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, the American University of Sharjah, the Yokohama GSA, Princeton, Harvard GSD and the University of Cluj in Romania. She is currently teaching at Delft University of Technology.

Marieke is a founding member of UNION3: an international research and design group focused on the problematic of renewal in European cities.