“Ishigami & Plants”
When reading a work of architecture, it might make sense to overlook non architectural elements. We might easily register something (say, a plant) as aesthetically present within a given work, without interrogating its assumed subordinate relationship to architecture. In the case of Ishigami Junya’s body of work, the most commonly accepted, yet uninterrogated element is not architecture or even furniture, but rather his obvious use of plants. As a means of understanding his deeper approach to architecture, these notes ruminate on Ishigami’s tendency to always allow plants to proliferate in his drawings and final buildings. As Taro Igarashi writes of Ishigami and his 2008 Venice Biennale project: “plants are not outside or “other” to Architecture” throughout the work (Ishigami 109). We can first examine the ways in which Ishigami uses plantings in his early projects. With these examples in mind, we can then then expand to how the use of plantings explain larger disciplinary questions of architecture Ishigami interrogates, such as transparency, scale and aggregation. Lastly, we can explore the potential source of influence for these interrogations.
Tables for a Restaurant
One of Ishigami’s earliest projects after his apprenticeship with the practice SANAA is a restaurant for ten people in pairs of two. With a brief from the client to provide seclusion for each pair, Ishigami developed five tables that expand to fill the room leaving only narrow hallways of space between. While this helpfully limits the occupation of space for the human body to distinct locations, the visual occupancy of the space still remains problematically open. To solve this spatial problem, Ishigami develops a series of plantings across each table that, while leaving the room physically open, re-scales sub-spaces for visiting patrons. This approach develops degrees of transparency not through architecture but through the spatial ambiguity specifically provided by plants. Discussing the project, Ishigami noted that he understood the tables almost as small architectures, a kind of interior urbanism. Upon these structures, “patrons could sit and enjoy eating as they gazed at their own little garden” (Ishigami 7). Plants behave as a scaled down version of a garden, just as tables behave as scaled down versions of architecture. This fluidity anticipates his later project’s scalar ambiguity on a spectrum from small to vast. With this project, Ishigami uses plantings both as spatial and scalar tools of architecture.
Taken further in his exhibition of the Long Table, Ishigami begins to integrate plantings with utensils and artifacts on the table surface. It is with this particular structural study that we can see Ishigami begins, at least representationally, his tendency of aggregating plants and artifacts together. In structural sketches to annotate weights of elements, bubble diagrams determine the placement of plants and from them, implied zones of activity.
Row House
Where the Tables for a Restaurant project defines architecture (the tables) first as realm of space to be redefined and rescaled by plants, Ishigami’s Row House inverts the relationship. A small site is wrapped in a translucent wall and operable translucent roof. This outer structure behaves not as architecture but rather as a manifestation of the site boundary. Within the site boundaries, a garden then contains a small house. In this case, the garden is determined spatially first, with the house as a kind of interiorized left over object. Notably, there are no glazed windows or doors between the house and the garden. Yet still Ishigami favors a density of plantings in the “garden” zone rather than the house, creating a false sense of the garden being “exterior” when in reality it is interior to the site walls and roof. In this project, Ishigami is using plantings not so much as a spatial or scalar tool but as a signifying tool to tell the inhabitant that one part of the architecture is “outside” (when really it isn’t). The inhabitant inside the house would perceive that there are no barriers blocking the outside to them, since they can reach out and touch a tree or bush. This ambiguity of what is inside versus outside and further, what we consider the architecture to be (the interior house in this case is meant to be experienced as architecture, while the exterior translucent wrapper of the site is not) is defined through the use of plants. Without them, one would very likely perceive the garden and the house as both interior spatial conditions to the site walls. Plants are the vital indicator of when the inhabitant is supposed to understand something as interior or exterior, architecture, or not. In this project, plants are a tool of signifying exteriority.
Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop
The KAIT takes the spatial, scalar and signifying uses of plantings and develops them at the scale of a medium sized building. Similar to the restaurant tables, the envelope of the workshop building serves as a boundary condition that is then inhabited by plants and artifacts. Originally, the KAIT was designed as a tight grid of columns that faced different directions to confuse their visual order. If it had been built this way, plantings would have likely been used to help confuse the spatial order of the columns. Instead, the client continued to ask for more and more specific scales of spaces that a uniform column grid could not provide for.
Similar to the table placement and sizing of the restaurant project, columns in the KAIT physically limit the human body but do not define degrees of transparency or a visual re-scaling of the over spatial condition. As with the restaurant design, plantings are used in specific locations to control degrees of transparency and to rescale the room, rather than architectonic approaches of walls, windows and translucent materials. As with the restaurant tables, zones of plantings and artifacts are referred to as “Little Gardens” where “each is a container for a displace space, in which flowers and greenery are carefully arranged” (Ishigami 26). Described in particular detail, Ishigami points out that “The spaces and their largeness or smallness are results not of the columns alone, but of various combined elements like furniture and plants” (Ishigami 29). These plantings also function to signify the continuity of interior and exterior space as with the Row House. Trees outside reflect on the glass, the columns set up a spatial forest, and the plantings visually connect and signify exteriority to the vast interior space. In this project once again, plantings function as a spatial, scalar and signifying tool, while further serving to organize modes of aggregation.
2008 Venice Biennale Japan Pavilion
In all of Ishigami’s previously built work, a boundary condition of either architectural envelop, surface or site delineates a space that plantings then further define through levels of transparency, re-scaling or signification of interiority vs exteriority. In the case of the Japan Pavilion, Ishigami inverts the ordering of the project by first defining the plantings, with envelopes of architecture then wrapped around them to equalize planted and non planted space. In this case, architecture becomes equal to or subservient to the ordering of plants. For the first time, plantings become not a tool for qualifying architecture but rather as an equal element to architecture where “space created by the plants and the peripheral landscape are equivalent” (Ishigami 97). This project anticipates the further blurring of hierarchy between architecture and landscape that permeates Ishigami’s later work. Exemplifying how hierarchy and scales are blurred, Ishigami cites tiny flower arrangements of Ikebana as an organizing method for the architecture and landscapes. “Plants that would never grow in Venice are arranged in the greenhouses like Ikebana to suit the respective proportions and surroundings” (Ishigami 97).
Little Gardens + Island Gardens
In these two unbuilt works, Ishigami takes plantings and spans them across a huge change in scales. Here, plantings become more continuous and understandable than architecture. In the case of Little Gardens project, tiny cups (architecture) on a table (yet another architecture) act as exhibition spaces for plants. Ishigami implies that one could perceive this arrangement as just a table of objects, or instead, an urbanism of objects. “To me, these … are like exhibition spaces. Tiny arrangements of flowers, greenery and open areas are made inside those little exhibition spaces … or maybe it’s a town, made up of a group of little exhibition spaces.” (Ishigami 64). This ambiguity of scale, spanned by plantings, is then flipped to its opposite extreme with the Island Garden project. Here, the lake serves as the same boundary the table did, and the islands are like the architectural cups. Inside these islands plantings pack the ground, with even an occasional architectural feature as well. In this project, plantings and the greater landscape become the hierarchical organizer of architecture.
Representation
This last “project” to be examined is Ishigami’s ongoing method of representation across multiple individual projects. It is worth noting that while his experimentation is visible in his built work, it is Ishigami’s representation of that built work (and more importantly his unbuilt work) that helps to give the most direct clues to the role of planting in his conception of architecture. In all of his drawings, architecture and furniture take on the same line weight as plantings. Further, where a plant might take twenty lines to draw, architecture often takes only four. In this way, Ishigami’s drawings prioritize the representation of plantings and their organizational logics as at minimum, equal to that of architecture. Ishigami states as much, that “while the formulation architecture and landscape typically suggests buildings within a larger encompassing environment, I have chosen to consider them both the same level. Here the plants present an environment of nearly the same scale and equal value to the built structures” (Ishigami, “Plants & Architecture” 101). Further, he says that “I am seeking ways to design so that nature comes close enough to be indistinguishable from architecture” (Ishigami, “Plants & Architecture” 101). Representation, as a first place of generating architecture exposes the prioritization of the architect. In the drawings of his various projects we can see how plantings come to literally and symbolically function as a method of blurring architecture and landscape.
In the Tables for a Restaurant project, Ishigami draws plants in full color, specifically placed and oriented, while grouping them by type. In additional drawings he includes individual sketches of each plant as well as their scientific name and size. Here again, architecture is noted simply as four lines to make a rectangle in plan, while the plantings are highly detailed. In the Row House, plantings become far more present than the house itself, and the site boundary walls almost invisible. Notably in plan, sketches show test fits not of furniture or spatial dimensions but of planting groups that imply certain human activities. Plants are on the one hand spatial elements in plan drawings and on the other hand almost living inhabitants of the house. In his book “Plants & Architecture,” Ishigami takes his representational approach even further. In these studies, plants and landscapes are the primary focus, with architecture scaling them to the human inhabitant.
With these early case studies we can see the germination of a set of tendencies that infiltrate Ishigami Junya’s later work, evident even in the very first Tables for a Restaurant. What began as tendencies or preferences later develop into ongoing disciplinary questions that Ishigami interrogates through extensive exhibitions and built work. We will see that these larger questions show themselves in the small planting experiments of his first projects.
Transparency
In various formats of writing and interview Ishigami expresses how he would like to achieve a transparency in architecture. We can understand this desire for transparency as something beyond the architectonic (of material transparency) to a kind of continuity of ground and plantings that makes the necessary enclosures of spaces “transparent”. With the Tables for a Restaurant, the plantings allow for a spatial transparency as well as a continuity from one part of the room to the next. As patrons “gazed at their own little garden, the other tables would be scenery around them” (Ishigami 7). In the Row House and KAIT workshop, the idea of transparency is furthered by Ishigami’s attempts to merge interior and exterior conditions as one continuous experience through the use of plantings.
I would like to regard plant life not just as a landscape element but as an element equivalent to buildings in the formation of a space. I am simultaneously seeking solutions on how to achieve the ultimate transparency - right on the boundary line between existence and non existence in a building . . . to transcribe into an architectural space that subtle state of being that is the property of plants, that is not possible on any architectural level (Ishigami 124).
In this statement, Ishigami articulates the inability of architecture to reach certain levels of transparency, even through the use of appropriate material conditions. His experiments with plantings work to place spatial and visual focus on something other than architecture. Through focusing on elements other than architecture, the necessary barriers of material transparency (glass) can be dissolved even further in our experience. Through using plants in ambiguous exterior/interior spaces such as the Row House, Ishigami is able to reach the ultimate transparency of merging inside and outside experiences of a building.
Scale
Once again, early experimentation of Ishigami’s plantings indicate a later radicalization of scale to be found in exhibitions of work such as “How Small, How Vast, How Architecture Grows”. Looking back to the Tables for a Restaurant, we can see Ishigami already bending ideas of scale as he understands tables as small architectures and the plants as their associated small gardens. In discussing his Little Gardens designs, Ishigami explains that:
I prefer to think of a model not as a mere reduced mockup . . . but as a small structure complete in that particular scale. Regarding life sized buildings and models on the same plane is the first step toward exploring new kinds of possible spaces. As with Little Gardens, here again I am contemplating architecture in a reality having that kind of scale” (Ishigami 123).
Ishigami goes on to explain that in his model studies of plantings, he conceives of them almost as Ikebana. In this way, he is shaping full size architecture and landscape through thinking of Ikebana planting approaches, meant for a much smaller scale. To Ishigami, the small and large scale of plantings, landscapes and architecture are all interchangeable where “the plants present an environment of nearly the same scale and equal value to the built structures” (Ishigami, “Plants & Architecture” 101).
Aggregation.
Lastly, we can find the emergence of Ishigami’s later interest in non hierarchical aggregations within his earliest plantings for the Tables for a Restaurant, the Long Table exhibition and further architecturalized in the tightly related planting and column layout of the KAIT workshop. In the Tables for a Restaurant, plantings are not placed throughout the table surfaces, but rather grouped to one side or another. Within these groupings of plants, individual plants are further grouped together by species type. While there is no geometric order, there is a general aggregate order to their placement. With the Long Table exhibition, plantings are grouped along with artifacts for a meal. While there is continuous spread of these plants and artifacts, they are still subtly subdivided by an aggregative logic based upon structural needs. In the KAIT workshop we can see the most developed aggregations of Ishigami’s early planting work, where the “little gardens” of furniture, plantings and columns define a variety of spatial types without any geometric order overlaid.
These three disciplinary lines of inquiry in transparency, scale and aggregation continue to drive Ishigami’s contemporary work. Looking back to their emergence with his early planting experiments, we can question their source of influence. Three influences are apparent and openly embraced by Ishigami himself, that of SANAA, western greenhouse botany and Japanese Ikebana flower arrangements.
SANAA
Ishigami Junya spent four years with Kazuo Sejima after graduating from the Tokyo University of the Arts. During his apprenticeship at SANAA multiple projects were present in the office that defined SANAA’s approach to transparency and aggregation. Notably the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary art were in process during that time. Both of the projects keep a direct relationship to the ground while pushing the perceptible boundaries of transparency between interior to interior and interior to exterior spaces. The 21st Century Museum in particular functions in plan as a non-hierarchical aggregation, reminiscent of multiple later experiments and projects taken on by Ishigami. One could take the plan for the 21st Century Museum and if miniaturized, consider it one of Ishigami’s plantings.
Greenhouses
In his book “Small Images,” Ishigami includes a section of European drawings of industrial and residential greenhouses. Here he chooses to include a series of drawings for smaller terrariums, indicating the scalar quality of the idea of western botany and greenhouse use. The terrarium is clearly like a scaled down greenhouse, even in the manner of it taking on an architectural form. Drawings of flowers are also included in the book, following a western botanist approach to layout, dimension and naming convention. It is worth noting that the greenhouse functions as a transparent boundary, that then aggregates plants and human circulation inside itself, clearly similar to Ishigami’s interior approaches to architecture and increasingly, exterior approaches as well. It is clear from the comparison that Ishigami is also influenced from the representational approach of historic and modern western botany drawings.
Ikebana
Multiple times Ishigami references Ikebana planting as his approach to both models, plantings and landscape. As mentioned before, Ishigami refers to his 2008 Japan Pavilion plantings as “arranged in the greenhouses like Ikebana to suit respective proportions” (Ishigami 97). When studying tree layouts in a physical model, he plants and “uproots trees in the model as if contemplating an Ikebana arrangement, move by move shaping the space by hand” (Ishigami 124). While some associations of Japanese plant arrangements might conjure the image of Bonsai, it is worth considering the notable methodological differences between Bonsai and Ikebana in relation to Ishigami’s work. Where Bonsai is a control and limiting of a plant’s growth to force it into a particular form, Ikebana is rather a collage and orientation of aggregate plant material into a diverse but complete whole. Ishigami’s work shows a repeated formal approach more similar to Ikebana than Bonsai.
Contemporary readings of Junya Ishigami’s work tend to focus on minimalist aesthetics inherited from SANAA and Ito Toyo before. While these architectonic standards are prevalent in Ishigami Junya’s work, they are not the defining quality that he seeks through his experiments and built work. Looking instead to his plantings, even in his earliest work, we can see an approach that works to dissolve the old boundaries of architecture and nature: “I am seeking ways to design so that nature comes close enough to be indistinguishable from architecture” (Ishigami, “Plants & Architecture” 101). As contemporary experiments by Ishigami begin to get rougher, more natural and monolithic, trying to understand the commonality of his thinking through minimalist aesthetics and transparent tectonics is unsatisfying. Looking instead to his ubiquitous embrace of plants, one can trace a line of inquiry from his very first project through to his most recent, that might even indicate the qualities of his work still to come.
Ishigami, Jun'ya. Ishigami Jun'ya : Chiisana Zuhan No Matomari Kara Kenchiku Ni Tsuite Kangaeta Koto = Small Images. 初版. ed., INAX Shuppan, 2008.
Ishigami, Jun'ya, Tarō Igarashi, and Alfred Birnbaum. Plants & Architecture. Japan: Junya.ishigami + Associates, 2008. Print.
Kuma, Chinatsu., et al. Junya Ishigami : How Small? How Vast? How Architecture Grows. Hatje Cantz, 2014.
Nishikawa, Issen., and Japan. Kokusai Kanōkyoku. The Floral Art of Japan. Maruzen, 1936.
Sejima, Kazuyo, et al. SANAA : Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa. Fundació Mies Van Der Rohe ; Distribution ACTAR D, 2010.
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