Serpentine Pavilion 2019: Architect Junya Ishigami on his design for this year

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Robert Bevan18 June 2019

Junya Ishigami is the architect of a floating world of his own devising.

His poetic structures are inspired by nature, by passing clouds, by the shifting surface of water. He’s flooded a wooded setting with magical shallow pools and designed cave-like structures such as the House of Peace project for Copenhagen harbour, where visitors will drift beneath its vaults in small, circular boats. A proposal for a church in China takes the form of a massive monolith wedged on end in a ravine. Buildings, he says, can be attics, ponds, secret forts; playthings.

As the architect of the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion, Ishigami promised a gravity-defying swoop of slate supported on slender supports. The pavilion would, he said, “appear to emerge from the ground of the surrounding park ... as though it had grown out of the lawn.” It would be a “cave-like space, a refuge for contemplation”, and it would, though weighty, “appear so light that it could blow away in the breeze like a billowing piece of fabric”.

Early concept images showed a brooding, hovering mass of rock enveloped in storm clouds, rainwater cascading off it — and this will no doubt be a moody, weather-responsive building. But when seen first on a sunny day it looks positively chipper, a lovely Cumbrian barn torqued then sliced open to welcome in light. Ishigami’s great skill is to make draping 61 tonnes of Westmoreland slate and 16 tonnes of steel look effortlessly light as well as lovely.

From one edge it appears as a slope of scree, a fell in front of the Serpentine Gallery, while from the opposite, the gallery end, the interior opens up and you see into a sculpted forest canopy.

When I walk around its edges with Ishigami, though, he backs away from the cave metaphor entirely: “I don’t think of it as a cave, it is a building as a landscape”. When I ask whether the envisaged illusion of a hill emerging from a park could be enhanced, in time, by longer grass (it hovers well above the newly laid turf), Ishigami demurs, saying the project is right for the site.

As the pavilion’s design has progressed, his thoughts about it have changed: the structure now makes him think of a “monstrous” blackbird whose edge is a wing, whose feathers are ragged slates, and whose white poles are driving rain. Evidently, he is not someone who likes to be pinned down — he relishes uncertainty.

Ishigami was born in 1974 in the suburbs of Kanagawa Prefecture outside Tokyo and worked for the prestigious Japanese firm of SANAA before setting up his own practice in 2004. He won a Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale and was the youngest ever winner of the Architectural Institute of Japan prize for his workshop building at Kanagawa Institute of Technology. He is reportedly demanding, and was in trouble earlier this year when it was revealed that interns working on the pavilion were not being paid; not an unusual situation, sadly, in Japanese architecture. The payment arrangements have since been resolved.

Like SANAA, Ishigami often champions improbably slender steel, glass and concrete structures but his ambition is to create an architecture that he has, in the past, called “free space” and which he ambitiously describes as “a new natural architecture”.

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A close connection between nature and building, between interior and exterior, has long been sought by designers — think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s house Falling Water, for instance. Ishigami is seeking something more; a synthesis of building and landscape. He finds the machine-made regularity of most contemporary interiors off-putting (“they become uniform”) and sees the potential for interiors, for entire buildings, to be devised as landscapes: “The building is the scenery, the weather is scenery. I don’t want to define the natural and artificial [separately].” He also wants to connect the contemporary to a “universal primitive” as represented by the simple stone roof found worldwide and that uses its own mass rather than a layer of plastic to keep the water out.

Dig more for what this “new natural architecture” might look like, especially with more complex or potentially prosaic building types than he’s completed to date, say, an office tower or a shopping centre that might constrain his magical touch, and he lists upcoming projects in China. These include a hotel and a cultural centre and the incorporation of room-sized boulders into a scheme. He also posits that a 10-kilometre cubed building could have clouds within it.

So why is this connection between the natural and constructed world particularly important to him? Did he grow up in the countryside?

“In the suburbs. I’m very fond of the countryside. I love beautiful scenery.” Might it also reflect a concern with ecology, with the fragility of the planet? “The natural world can be very strong and scary and architecture can be fragile.” Not least in a Japanese earthquake, he adds.

Ishigami is frustratingly unwilling to much explain himself in person, and is a free spirit when it comes to redefining the metaphorical purpose of his pavilion, but his architecture undoubtedly results in poetry. And not only metaphorically; after our interview a further text is issued by the architect: “Blown by the rain, the giant blackbird wafts into the air, the slim rods supporting the roof resembling innumerable streaks of rain. The giant blackbird floats in the leaden London skies, dragging its vast dark shadow on the ground, slipping, sliding, flying away.”

So perhaps we should take his pavilion on his terms, and within the building type’s own history of whimsy, folly and dreams, rather than pouring magic-killing cold philosophy onto Ishigami’s architectural weather-making.

The 2019 Serpentine Pavilion is open to the public from June 21 until October 6 (serpentinegalleries.org)

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