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The first retrospective of the work of the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami is an installation with 58 projects, built and not built. They evoke the themes, challenges and research of the last ten years.
The layout consists of a rhythmic succession of slender tables on which all the projects are juxtaposed. Ishigami transcends the impossibility of exhibiting architecture with bravura: ‘How vast? How small? How architecture grows’ is a work of art too. The 58 models are ‘small-scale illustrations’ that invite the attentive viewer to be receptive to sensations, ideas and a different consciousness. They concentrate on natural perceptions, phenomena and characteristics transposed into architecture. Ishigami has a provocative way of taking non-hierarchical architecture and nature as his starting point. It leads him to new forms, unprecedented structures and a different sort of space, with experimental relationships between man and nature.
The notion of scale is nowhere to be seen in this presentation. Each project – a new, visionary city, a small home, a table – is a world of its own. Ishigami deliberately moves the boundaries of the concept of architecture, in theory, representation and practice.
What Ishigami aspires to in this exhibition is ‘to reflect on the possibilities of architecture and to broaden its scale, to the world of the planets and architecture, to subatomic particles and architecture, to architecture and everything else that isn’t architecture’.