junya ishigami's art biotop project of a water garden in tochigi, japan opens

earlier this year, just weeks before the first major solo exhibition

earlier this year, just weeks before the first major solo exhibition – dedicated to the work of junya ishigami – at the fondation cartier pour l’art contemporain opened, junya ishigami took designboom around his office in roppongi, tokyo and introduced us to the development project / the botanical farm garden art biotop, for a new resort brand collection of niki resort – primarily on the existing artist residence ‘art biotop nasu’. the unique farm ‘water garden’ in tochigi has been inaugurated yesterday, on june 3rd, 2018. a farm restaurant and spa facilities will follow.

junya ishigami proposes architecture for a world that doesn’t care much about buildings. for ishigami, this means operating without programmatic constraints, to be free from conventional forms of commissioning and building architecture. his ‘freeness’ contemplates the presence of ever more anachronistic forms of fabrication and construction of contemporary architecture, and the metaphysical relationships those objects create with human and non-human life.

art biotop: for the water or botanical farm garden – unlike conventional farming that struggles to expand crop acreage in order to increase efficiency – interpersonal communications are particularly important. it makes visitors feel as if theyʼre staying in a garden, making the most of nature, land art on a human scale and results

in a new natural environment created by manʼs wisdom.

‘the primary objective of this project was to create a new form of nature as an extension of nature as we now know it; the future of nature through the eyes of man. the site was originally heavily wooded before it was cleared for rice fields. later, it became meadowlands. by maximizing the environmental potential of this land, we will create a new landscape that fuses ‘density’ and ‘relationship’ which do not coexist in nature.’ says junya ishigami to designboom.