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1/21/2009

The new issue of The Japan Architect (Issue 72: Winter, 2009), opens with a conversation between Ryue Nishizawa and Junya Ishigami. Nishizawa is, with Kazuyo Sejima, one half of SANAA, without doubt the most influential presence in contemporary Japanese architecture. Long acknowledged as visionaries in their native country, in recent years Sejima and Nishizawa have finally begun to make strides internationally, completing such high-profile projects as the Zollverein School of Management in Germany and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Ishigami is one of the brightest figures in an emergent generation of young Japanese architects who have either worked at SANAA or at very least grown up in Sejima's very long shadow. After a four year stint at SANAA, Ishigami opened his own office in 2004. A series of sublimely executed projects of different scales and programs has thrust Ishigami into the spotlight, and injected a new sense of lightness, surrealism and the sublime into an architectural landscape that has for too long been governed by the shopworn ideologies of early 20th-century modernism.

At the heart of Ishigami's project is a supple balance between the abstract and the real. At KAIT Workshop at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Ishigami’s first fully-realized building, an irregularly spaced grid of whip thin columns give the impression of a luminous forest, punctuated by potted houseplants, freestanding millwork fixtures and shifting squares of light emitted by a bank of skylights high above the broom-finished concrete floor. “Balloon,” the centerpiece of the Space for your Future exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, was an irregular aluminum rhomboid the size of a five storey building, filled with helium and floating lazily about the atrium in which it was held like a captive leviathan.

Ishigami recently completed his first American commission, the flagship store for Yohji Yamamoto on Gansevoort Street. The oddly lopsided shop stands on a triangulated lot and is bisected by a tapering footpath. The rendered brick, sashless windows and expressed steel are a break from the architect’s conventional material palette (like his mentors, he tends to suppress materiality to enhance formalist abstraction), but in his concession to New York’s traditional construction sensibility, Ishigami has succeeded in bringing his concretized abstraction to the scale of urban design.

Like many of his contemporaries, what is perhaps most exciting about Ishigami’s work is its naïve exuberance. If SANAA’s work (and especially the New Museum) has been criticized for keeping the visitor at a certain chilly academic remove, Ishigami’s work is filled with an almost childish delight in the possibility of something new: a fresh, awkward design sensibility that resides at the nexus of architecture and art. It’s a sensibility born of the tension between the strength of an idea and the necessary translation that occurs in its realization. In response to Nishizawa’s question, “How do you feel about designing a building on both an abstract level and a real level,” Ishigami states his approach to architecture concisely: “I think it is important to design on both levels….The result is a design that can accept and assimilate factors on a real level that had not been foreseen by the architect….I am interested in how the strengths of real architecture can be connected to, or blended with, the strengths of architecture in the abstract.”