Junya Ishigami

From 11 December 2013 to 27 April 2014 arc en rêve centre d’architecture presents an exhibition devoted to Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, jointly produced with the deSingel International Arts Campus.

For Junya Ishigami, architecture is a world of infinite possibilities: both a repository of knowledge and a laboratory for prospective experimentation. His approach, which combines scientific and poetic elements, forms the basis for a dreamlike creative process that transforms dreams into reality. He mainly draws inspiration from nature, methodically conceptualising his projects and always seeking to push back their limits. Though apparently simple, his work is both rich and complex. It both contains and embraces the complexity of the worlds we live in, blurring the frontiers between design, architecture, urbanism, landscape and geography.

His tireless quest for transparency and lightness goes beyond the minimalist aesthetic. It is rooted in a determination to rid architecture of appearances and futility in order to achieve perfect harmony: architecture must step aside to create a total environment celebrating nature. The exhibition presents 56 projects via experimental models, some large, some small, made of white or coloured metal, wood or cardboard. Ishigami’s work explores issues such as density, transport, landscapes, structures, scale, and the urban/rural dichotomy.

These models make up a body of work that asks the underlying question: how can architecture re-enchant the world? Ishigami’s acute awareness of the way humans relate to their environment and the way he calls on us to design alternative ways of living are wonderfully reflected in this show. This “presence and absence” of architecture cultivates a form of ambiguity at the boundaries between occupied and empty space, architecture and nature, the artificial and the organic, resulting in extraordinary spaces. In just a few years Junya Ishigami has opened the way for an approach that is able to go beyond technical processes and build a poetic world and inhabitable forms– from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.