Junya Ishigami, Freeing Architecture

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.