Ichio Matsuzawa has spent his profession questioning what structure may be when it stops attempting to be stable, everlasting, and even completely seen. Since establishing his impartial follow, the Tokyo-based architect has cultivated a repute for tasks that exist on the threshold of notion, from short-term installations at Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion to the Artwork Homes on Inujima. His latest set up for Artwork Week Tokyo’s bar supplied a concentrated expression of this ongoing enquiry: a piece of what he calls formless structure, outlined not by partitions or quantity however by the altering relationships between individuals, mild, movement, and the town itself.
Ichio Matsuzawa: Structure on the fringe of notion
Ichio Matsuzawa, idea picture for the AWT Bar 2025
(Picture credit score: Ichio Matsuzawa Workplace, courtesy Artwork Week Tokyo)
He created the bar with a collection of curved, three-millimetre acrylic sheets, every a two-by-four-metre panel with 94 per cent transparency. They hovered on the fringe of consciousness, current solely once they caught the sunshine, distorted a likeness or, momentarily, eclipsed a shifting physique.
‘I wished the fabric to vanish, in order that the structure is activated by the customer, the environment, and the environment, not by the article itself.’
Ichio Matsuzawa
The panels have been heat-formed in an industrial oven utilizing metal moulds, a course of as delicate because it was unpredictable, because the acrylic turned virtually liquid when heated, making the last word curves inconceivable to regulate. Matsuzawa embraced the chance, permitting ‘stunning accidents’ to form the ultimate kinds, discarding every part that felt too inflexible, exact, or synthetic. What remained was a collection of ephemeral thresholds that appeared and dissolved as guests moved by means of the house.
That is the place Matsuzawa drew a line between structure and sculpture. Objects, he commented, are static. Structure is perpetual: it modifications with individuals, local weather, sound, and time. Within the bar, nothing stayed nonetheless. From the road, shadows of bushes rippled throughout the acrylic, and echoes bent and multiplied. The breeze pushed each surfaces and pictures out of alignment. ‘New, mirage-like areas are always being generated,’ he defined.
Set up view of the AWT Bar 2025
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Artwork Week Tokyo)
The transparency additionally blurred the divide between in and out, a deliberate technique given the bar’s street-level website in central Tokyo, which turned a part of the structure, not merely the backdrop. Nature, too, entered the framework: wind, branches, daylight, passing cyclists, and the informal choreography of pedestrians.
To counter the coolness of the acrylic, Matsuzawa designed stools and tables wrapped in richly colored Afghan textiles, introducing tactility, heat, and cultural layering. A soundscape by composer Yusuke Nakano accomplished the multisensory atmosphere.
Set up view of the AWT Bar 2025
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Artwork Week Tokyo)
Matsuzawa, who has quietly constructed up a repute for tasks that query materials presence and spatial notion, noticed the AWT Bar as a part of a philosophical enquiry into structure as expertise relatively than kind. ‘Every customer encounters a unique house, relying on their actions, their timing, their sensitivity,’ he mentioned. ‘The work isn’t full till somebody inhabits it.’
The bar served cocktails designed by artists, together with Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group and Tsuyoshi Ozawa, and snacks by chef Shinobu Namae, together with Seaweed Jambon Beurre made with Suji-Aonori seaweed butter and two sorts of seaweed pickles, however the bar’s actual takeaway was spatial. In creating structure that existed solely by means of notion relatively than solidity, Matsuzawa inverted typical notions of what a constructing ought to be.
Artist cocktails for the AWT Bar 2025, from left to proper: Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Pangaea, Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group’s Gold Expertise Cocktail, and Miya Yanagai’s elevator women
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Artwork Week Tokyo)
Fairly than defining house, his near-invisible acrylic panels dissolved it – making the architectural expertise one thing guests sensed relatively than noticed, felt relatively than touched. For an architect dedicated to areas that emerge from sensation relatively than construction, the AWT Bar wasn’t merely a fee. It was a manifesto.
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