石上純也への、ルイジアナ美術館によるインタビュー動画「Creating Nature with Time」が公開されています。日本語で聞けるインタビューです。

“If things created by humans should function next to natural things, the passing of time is necessary. Only the passage of time will bring forward the kind of landscape I want to create,” says the renowned Japanese architect Junya Ishigami. Learn about his award-winning project, the poetic landscape ‘Water Garden’, in this short video.

When a hotel owner hired Ishigami to create a new garden and an addition to his hotel, the premise was that the addition should be built in a forest, and the garden in an area with meadows alongside. Because they were only allowed to build in the woods – meaning having to cut down almost all of the trees – Ishigami decided “to move all the trees from the forest and create a new forest.” Each tree was carefully relocated, uprooted and replanted over four years. They also relocated the moss that was already there, used the existing stones to make stepping stones, and integrated the water in the area: “We used everything that was already there and changed the layout to create a new artificial environment that was as close as possible to something natural,” Ishigami says. In continuation of this, 50 years earlier, the location had been rice paddies, and so Ishigami wanted to combine the rice paddy landscape with the forest landscape. Ishigami explains how it wasn’t about creating something from nothing, but rather about using the already existing environment and “letting the passage of time create a new garden. So, the concept was that the garden would take a long time to mature.”