'KAIT' by junya ishigami architects


japanese junya ishigami architects designed 'KAIT' a studio/workplace constructed on
the kanagawa institute of technology campus in the suburbs of tokyo.
the client wanted
this structure to be a place where students could work on diverse self-initiated projects
to make things, and to also have a high public capacity, as it would be open for use by
local children.

with regard to the flexibility this building required, i saw little need to tailor sections of
the plan very differently according to the various programs it would house, as each of
the individual spaces would necessarily be specialized to some extent. then, to ensure
that users would be have the freedom to alter the spaces to meet different needs within
a reasonably short time period, it began to make more sense to me to pursue flexibility
in the relations between adjoining places, and in the way various spaces are connected
with each other. this view led to the thinking that some soft, ambiguous kind of borders
could be invented by raising pillars in a random fashion.


ishigami wanted to provide earthquake-resistant walls, but make this building work on
just an ensemble of slight pillars of varying proportions. what shape the sections would be,
the coordinates and the angles of the pillars would be adjusted by the millimeter.
how 'densely set' should the pillars be? resultant spaces would be best open toward which
directions and to what extent? the studies we did to examine these issues became quite extensive.
we did models in numerous scales ranging from small to extremely large. sketches were made
with the plan depicted in dots, to explore just what kind of spaces would exist between pillars.
studies of the plan were done with a program written for this project on an special cad.
they had an excel program created to do trial calculations and give us general ideas on
the structural soundness, and so on.

all these were carried out simultaneously throughout, and in the end te architects were able to
arrive at a structure that stood on 305 pillars, almost none of which had identical sections or
angles. at the same time, borders between individual places emerged, as a result of these pillars.




photo © iwan baan



photo © iwan baan




















photo © iwan baan



placement of desks and chairs