Autorentext

Junya Ishigami was in born 1974 in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, and belongs to the young generation of Japanese architects who emerged at the beginning of the 2000s in the wake of Toyo Ito and Kazuyo Sejima. His work was shown at MoMA, New York in 2016 as part of the exhibition A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond. After his beginnings at the architectural firm SANAA, Junya Ishigami established junya.ishigami+associates (Tokyo) in 2004.
Conceptual and poetic, his work breaks away from architectural rules and constraints. It is rapidly recognized for its originality and awarded many prizes, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010.
Some of his large-scale projects include the construction of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology (Japan) in 2008, a building that is exceptional in its lightness and in the architectural continuity it offers between interior and exterior spaces; the restoration (beginning in 2011) of Moscow's Polytechnic Museum and its transformation into a garden-museum; and the design of the "House of Peace" for the city of Copenhagen, a massive cloud-shaped building located on an island, with a floor made of water, intended as a symbol of peace. The artist also created numerous on-site installations, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2007 and at London's Barbican Art Gallery in 2011. His project How Small? How Vast? How Architecture Grows, conceived for a display at the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo in 2010, and presented at Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux in 2014, became part of the collections of the Centre Pompidou in 2016.
In 2018, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain organized the artist's first monographic exhibition, revealing through a series of models the genesis of about twenty projects and his research on functions, forms, scales, and the environment in architecture.

Klappentext

A true ode to freedom, the book Freeing Architecture demonstrates Junya Ishigami's incredible ability to conceive his practice beyond the limits of knowledge and architectural thought.

Lightness, transparency, simplicity, and communion with nature are Japanese architect Junya Ishigami's watchwords. In his architectural masterworks, which he compares to landscapes, he eliminates the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces.

This new edition, in a more intimate format than the first edition published by Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, offers a journey into his poetic and sensitive imagination, where a line drawn in the sky becomes a monument (Sydney Cloud Arch), and where animal silhouettes inspire the roof of a kindergarten (Forest Kindergarten). From churches to museums, from landscaped parks to house-gardens, the diversity of the architect's creations reveals the constant reinventions in his work. Whether he molds a concrete structure from a field (Noël), or moves a forest to compose an oneiric landscape (Nikki), or extends a museum through its foundations (Musée Polytechnique de Moscou), Junya Ishigami combines poetry and technical achievement to create a thought about humanity's place in architecture.