The site where I have designed the house for my mother was originally occupied by my grandparents’ house. It is also where I grew up during the first few years of my life. The building was part of an old farming village, with a wide expanse of rice fields to the west and a beautiful view of the mountains rising in the distance. My childhood memories of this site are of an intimate south garden surrounded by hedges and a windbreak formed by large trees, and the sense of being drawn into the inner depths of the adjoining, mostly tatami-floored house of my grandparents.

In recent years, one by one, many of the large plots of land that comprised the village have removed their windbreaks due to the difficulties in carrying out maintenance work for the ageing inhabitants. As a result of inheritance, many plots have been split up into smaller parcels on which small houses have been built. The contrast between the array of private gardens and the uninterrupted openness of the rice fields defined the village’s characteristic atmosphere, which today can no longer be felt. 

After my grandparents passed away, this site was left unoccupied and the windbreak was cut down years ago. However, the former plot division has remained intact, only cleared of the building. Drawing on my memories, I am making a house here for my mother on a scale where she can reach everything. Currently nearing completion, it will be a gentle and fitting environment for this site and for my mother’s everyday life. All the living spaces will have a depth of 4.6 metres and overlook the south-facing garden. The shallowness of the interiors means that the garden can be perceived everywhere. The height of the eaves is at 1.3 metres, which is slightly lower than my mother’s height, at a level she can reach with her hands.

Extending 32 metres east-west, the low eaves form a gentle pause between the garden and the interior of the house. The shallow interior facing the low, long windows is floored in tatami. From the brightness by the windows to the darker areas at the back, the long and narrow space will give rise to a harmonious coexistence of both light and shade. The wall surrounding the garden is seemingly continuous with the exterior walls of the house. The ground extends continuously from the tatami floor, and the garden parallel to the long eaves forms a gradual slope upwards towards the south, until it reaches the top of the southern wall to form an embankment.

As my mother likes plants, a variety of vegetation will be arranged in the garden, and with the sloping ground, her everyday life will be surrounded by them. Instead of the large trees forming a windbreak, the plants that correspond to the scale of my mother’s life will begin to encircle the house.

(Junya Ishigami)

My first project was called Table for a Restaurant, a 50-square-metre interior in Yamaguchi Prefecture. The client was the owner of a French-Italian restaurant who requested a space in his hometown that would be “suitable for a new contemporary cuisine”. Back then we were both in our 20s. Just as he was pursuing something new with his small restaurant, I wanted to pursue something new in architecture. Although it was only an interior design project, I wanted to think about it as a piece of architecture. In the small existing space, I arranged five thin rectangular tables made of lightweight steel. The rest of the interior was finished as plainly as possible. Upon completion of the work, the owner said to me, “If I ever open another restaurant, I’ll be calling on you to design it.”

A few years ago, as promised he invited me to design his new restaurant that also included his residence. The site was near the first restaurant, located in a pleasant context on higher ground adjacent to fields and a copse extending beyond. The area of about 1,000 square metres was spacious enough to create several parking spaces. Even though I hadn’t seen him for a long time, he looked much the same, except for his greying hair and the fact that he now had a family. By that time he had also shifted his focus to authentic French cuisine. He explained how much care he takes in the selection of ingredients and wines, revealing how seriously he takes his work.

Among his few requests, he emphasised his wish for an “architecture that feels as heavy as possible, and that acquires a patina over time, something that embraces the roughness of nature. Authentic cuisine requires a space like that.” I then sensed there had been a significant change in his mindset: eating in an old wooden izakaya certainly lends more charm and depth to the food compared to eating in a new commercial building.

In addition, he aspired to have space to cook more freely, and for people to eat more freely. He not only wanted to be able to serve food to his visiting acquaintances in the restaurant, but also in his living room, and sometimes even have them stay overnight.

As a result, I had to think about how to conceive a house starting from elements of uncertainty. Not only should its charm increase over time, but the degradation and stains that accumulate over time should also be included in the design. here should be no clear boundary between the two functions, with the liveliness of the restaurant and everyday domestic life flowing into a space that felt as heavy as a cave. To transpose this demand into a building, I returned to the fundamentals of the construction process.

Generally, a building site involves numerous trades, which makes it necessary to organise every component and bring everything together harmoniously. On this occasion I decided to do the opposite, by giving a few artisans the image of what I had in mind. Thanks to their expert skills, I was sure I would be able to incorporate the unanticipated discrepancies on site. The forms of the volumes were defined by numerous study models of the client’s lifestyle.

The final model was then scanned and turned into 3D coordinate data, which was subsequently input into a total station (an optical surveying instrument), and the artisans dug the holes by hand, checking the positions on site via an iPad. In this phase, the ground revealed different colours and grains – red, green and grey soil, and strata with gravel or rocks. Grass began to grow in some spots and a few small subsidences occurred, just as would happen in a natural landscape.

These occurrences are imprinted onto the concrete. Once all of the holes had been dug out and connected, the concrete was poured using the excavations as a mould. From now until the summer, we will be excavating the soil away from the hardened structure and the windows will be glazed to define the interiors. The spirit of this concrete is something other than architecture, but soon that is precisely what it will become.

(Junya Ishigami)

Like a one-kilometre-long walkway in the middle of the water, a narrow belt, albeit variable in width, crosses a lake from side to side in the Chinese wetlands of Bailuwan.

The water penetrates the building under the glass partitions that serve as exterior walls, creating interior strands like a thin beach that continues into the distance. Visitors are invited to follow this covered path bordered by two shores, which varies in width from 5 to 20 metres. An entrance can be found at either end of the building, which visitors can traverse in full, discovering over the course of their stroll a variety of areas designed as a visitor centre, shops, relaxation spaces and dining facilities, among others.

The building’s sinuosity, the transparency of the lateral walls and the continual presence of water all lead to the creation of a new landscape, where built and natural elements merge and become one.

The Chapel of the Valley is an ecumenical chapel located at the bottom of a small valley in Shandong, China. The project takes advantage of the terrain’s natural ruggedness. Accentuating the depth of the crevices by approximately 20 metres, the chapel seems to surge from the ground.

The building rises to a height of 45 metres with a width of 1.3 metres at its narrowest part. The chapel consists of two closely spaced reinforced concrete curving walls, varying from 22 to 180 centimetres in thickness. The walls, which run alongside each other to form a narrow entrance, gradually move further apart and then merge to enclose the altar space. Because the space gets wider as one advances through the building, the entrance is plunged into darkness while the altar receives sunlight.

This spatial sequence creates the impression of light coming from the depth of the building. The new chapel space is created as a continuation of the valley’s particular proportions, though its monumental scale radically exceeds that of the existing landscape. A new valley is created, open to the wind and rain.

The project intends to create an architecture like a forest that will connect children with their surrounding natural environment, offering the possibility of outdoor education while reflecting their perspective of the world.

The spatial composition of the building was planned as little as possible in order to allow freedom in the children’s play and activities.

Most of the space is designed at the children’s scale, however a range of architectural scales was considered to think about the different spaces: classrooms include the scale of an adult, some outdoor spaces can only be used by children, and others are places where even children crawling or crouching cannot reach.

As a result, the project’s diversity of scales and spaces inspires and accommodates a multitude of activities. A reinforced concrete roof with large openings covers the building and merges with the ground in many places, creating spaces for play and other activities.

The roof is supported on slender steel pillars, which transfer the vertical load, while the horizontal load is carried by the contact points with the ground. The roof design has followed a development process comprising a series of collages, each gathering images such as animals, plants and children’s illustrations.

These studies have been progressively stylised to create the shape and contours of the building. Emerging from no longer recognisable figurative imagery, the architecture uses form to allow children to perceive and imagine a multitude of visions and possibilities. For instance, where the roof dips downwards, children feel as if they are falling on top of a flower or sliding down an elephant’s trunk.

Abstract and concrete, giant and minuscule, interior and exterior combine so that each space gives every child the opportunity to explore their boundless imaginations, thanks to the creation of an architecture entirely composed of non-architectural elements. This architecture is designed as a landscape, made of children’s scales and based on their unique way of seeing the world.