Time: August 24 – October 17, 2010
Place: Shiseido Gallery
A number of elaborately made drawings and maquettes are lined up in the exhibition space. The quality of these displays is high enough to pull every visitor – even those without any expert knowledge of architecture – instantly over into the world-view they represent. In fact, these maquettes that each seem to be taken directly from a picture book communicate well Ishigami Junya’s remarkable imagination of the world and space. However, a quick glance over the texts that are exhibited with each item reveals that this imagination is solidly backed by technical capacity and architectural conception, which is where these maquettes' persuasive power stems from. One could perhaps call it "architectural imagination".
It appears to me that Ishigami’s imagination is directed toward architecture as a strategic move or occasion for transforming spaces, rather than objects with material qualities such as "buildings". By arranging in "Big Patio" several houses in a ring enclosing a plot of grassland, Ishigami transforms a natural outdoor landscape into an inner courtyard. In "Yama no tembodai (mountain observatory)", steps cover the entire area of a slope, resulting in a structure in which a "path" for people to walk on is not distinguishable from its exterior setting. According to the idea to "create landscapes like designing buildings", the mountain itself takes on an architectural function. Somewhat the counterpart of this project, "Hito ga atsumaru gake (Cliff at which people gather)" is a building fitted with outdoor terraces resembling rice paddies on each floor, while the construction’s cliff-like side is designed as a meeting place. Very interesting are also the plans inspired by the territorial definition of a "site". In "Plot & Houses", by designing sites just like houses without considering them as fixed conditions, Ishigaki attempts to establish a new relationship between buildings and their surrounding exterior spaces. Houses are built in "small valleys" that for this project of the same name are likened to building sites, while "Umi no naka no kankyo (Environment under the sea)", in which circular walls are placed in the water to dam up the surrounding water, the generation of new "sites" in the form of layers between building and their surrounding environments obviously mark thought experiment for creating a new connection between exterior and interior. At the same time, Ishigami’s methodology changes the materiality of architecture altogether. For example, "Ookina ie (Big house)" illustrates the idea to generate a natural environment inside a building as a result of the construction’s extremely large scale. Through the formation of clouds and even rain inside the house, "a space that exceeds the scale of an interior room is generated inside the building," and the actual construction itself entirely transforms into something else. Nonetheless, expanding territories to the exterior is by far not what these approaches broadening the definition of architecture are entirely focused on. As the exhibition title suggests, and one can also guess from the various works based around the idea of particles, the expansion also happens in the opposite direction, going toward smallness. Finally, "Kumo no katachi (Shapes of clouds) is certainly the one project that reflects Ishigami’s "architectural imagination" most intensively as it keeps expanding across various perceptions of scale. The motif of the cloud, a huge entity that is at once an accumulation of microscopic particles, reveals glimpses of Ishigami’s areas of interest, such as definite/indefinite contours, minimized/maximized scale, and interior/exterior space, and at the same time it has to be the perfect screen for Ishigami to project his vast imagination. This is surely underpinned by his own comment, "It is fun to dream up new spaces and buildings from the shapes of clouds."
Breathing new life into people’s activities and natural surroundings by means of architecture. Like paint dripped into a pool of water, it spreads into the environment little by little, and causes gradual spatial transformations. The gentle look of the maquettes on display at this exhibition is, as I would like to think, a product of the sensitive hand that Ishigami Junya uses for grasping the world.