Architecture as Air: Château La Coste

It would be an understatement to say that Junya Ishigami's Architecture as Air: Château La Coste borders on the fringes of architecture. Next to the fleshy, fibrous and decidedly solid volumes of London's Barbican Centre, it seems to be as ephemeral a relation to architectural form as can be imagined. These caveats are familiar; this particular line of enquiry was memorably exhibited at the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture, where Ishigami's site-specific installation won the coveted Golden Lion in spite of another smaller cat.

Ishigami's latest installation picks out the contour of the Curve gallery with a line of 'raindrop' columns; barely perceptible white filaments float against the white walled space, tracing an 80 metre arc around the Barbican. The columns are incredible objects themselves; each a hand-rolled tube of white carbon fibre sheet measuring 0.9mm in diameter, the approximate width of a drop of rain. They rise—rather than fall—to around four metres and hover quietly in mid-air, apparently supported by nothing but will. In fact the columns are almost invisibly held by 'cloud' threads or transparent nylon fibres—2756 fibres to be precise, 52 cloud-threads to each of the 53 raindrop-column. Between these, air—as architecture—and space, its very essence; an intangible wall constructed by the suggestion of a line.

The numbers may cause wonder, indeed hushed reverence seems innate to the very experience of one's visit. Upon entering the gallery space, you are politely requested to remove your shoes—as well as any heavy coats, bags and bulky accoutrements which might inadvertently tangle the spidery threads of the installation. Still fresh in our memories, of course, is last year's feline sabotage; here too, the delicate structure suffered at least one human assault before opening day. Nerves and numbers, however, are shed with shoes and coats; stepping barefoot down one level into the gallery space, as one's eyes adjust to whiteness, fragile lines slowly emerge from the pale. The compulsion to look up for the delicate cobweb of threads is matched by the invitation to travel down the length of the space, as intimated by Ishigami's installation.

Spaced slightly further apart than a large pace, the sinuous columns act like the thrum of a second hand or a heartbeat, articulating the space as you walk through it. Though visually modest, it is undeniably a very serene experience. The calm rhythm is disturbed only by a periodic urge to stare inelegantly upwards, first balking at the absence of visible support, now spotting a fragile nylon hair against the Barbican's bush-hammered concrete and cable shafts.

Curator Catherine Ince has long admired Ishigami's work, having encountered it at close range at the tenth Venice Biennale of Architecture, in 2008. There his ghostly greenhouses, festooned with living curtains of vines, clung like parasites to the Japanese pavilion and demonstrated in more literal terms the architect's interest in bringing together the structural languages of architecture and nature. It is telling that Ince's decision to install Ishigami's piece marks the first instance of an architect fulfilling the Curve Art commissions. Ishigami is a practicing architect, concerned with structure and space; however, rather than the formal or even ecological implications of organic geometry, Ishigami meditates on the poetics of natural and physical structures. By dealing with space at an atomic level—between particles of matter, at the scale of cloud particles and rain droplets—Ishigami's investigations are more profound than they are pragmatic; it feels appropriate, then, that his structure is described as being "conceived", rather than built.

Yet Ishigami insists that his existential architectures-as-air are no more than the iterations of a certain idea in a specific contexts. The number of columns is significant only in that it successfully fills the space; the position of threads dictated by efficiency and load alone. Rather than claiming any grand critique of contemporary architecture or prescriptive manner of thinking about space, he marvels as much in potential technical challenges as in the philosophical and almost spiritual suggestions of his design. Across town, another public installation—Peter Zumthor's hortus conclusus—is a correspondent study in black. Both monochrome, unassuming spaces suggest that in London this summer, architectural thinking is indulging in a pensive moment of reflection.
Shumi Bose

28 June–16 October 2011
Junya Ishigami: Architecture as Air
The Curve, Barbican Centre
London