Junya Ishigami How small? How vast? How architecture grows

Junya Ishigami Exhibition How small? How vast? How architecture grows’ is currently on at the Shiseido Gallery in Ginza.

Junya Ishigami is an up-and-coming architect who, after completing his Master’s in Fine Arts at the Tokyo University of the Arts, spent some time working at the architectural firm Kazuyo Sejima & Associates before going on to open his own company Junya.Ishigami + Associates in 2004. He has several awards since striking out on his own and has been much talked about after recently winning the Golden Lion for the Best Project of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2010.

. Ishigami is due to release a book of his artworks in 2011 through London-based art publishers Thames & Hudson. Sixty of his major projects, which will be featured in the book, have been selected for the current exhibition. In the exhibition models, drawings and other works have been lined up systematically on delicately designed displays.

Ishigami’s architecture is always finished with a delicate and poetic expression, achieved through a study of dynamic and optical architecture that is inseparable from scientific ideas. So that the architecture in its project phase and the actual construction are treated with equal value, the architectural models and drawings appear to have been given the same intensity as the constructions.

Just as a drawing by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe transformed the city landscape, Ishigami’s drawings have a vision for shaping the future world.