Since around 2016, when I began working on projects in Takamatsu, I have been thinking about stone. More precisely, it may be about the temporality that stone carries. Until then, stone had felt elusive to me—like the unfathomable depth found in the world of antiques—something I could not fully grasp, and therefore could not find compelling. Rather, it was a material I tended to avoid: too strong, too unchanging, and difficult to handle. In contemporary architecture, stone is often understood as a finishing material. At the time, I sought clarity by aligning structure and finish as closely as possible, and stone did not fit easily within that approach.
For some time, Isamu Noguchi and his work had remained somewhere in the back of my mind. Each time I visited Takamatsu, however, his presence felt increasingly immediate. One day, on the way to a site, I decided to visit the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Mure. There, surrounded by numerous stone sculptures, I felt as if time itself had come to a standstill.
Across the site were works that seemed at once unfinished and yet beyond further intervention. These objects gave rise to the place itself, unsettling my own sense of time. More than thirty years had passed since Noguchi’s death, and the buildings had been repaired in places. The outdoor sculptures, however, remained unmoved—indifferent to the changes around them, as if nothing had happened. I could not help but imagine what this place might become after another hundred, or two hundred years. There was a tension that compelled such speculation. I imagined a future in which the buildings might disappear, leaving only the sculptures, merged with the terrain, like the remnants of a ruin.
This experience drew my attention to the temporality inherent in stone—or perhaps in all materials. How long does it take for stone to become stone, and then to cease being stone? What about iron? Wood? Glass? Each material carries its own lifespan. Most building materials around us are considered within a span of twenty to thirty years, or perhaps fifty if structural continuity is taken into account. It was a moment when I realized that I had been thinking about architecture only within such limited timeframes.
Materials are born, weathered, and eventually disintegrate. The same can be said of architecture. The time in which most buildings appear and disappear must be, for stone, only an instant. I felt I could begin to understand, if only slightly, why Noguchi was drawn to stone. Even within the same span of one year, each material experiences time differently. It may have been an obvious realization, but for me it was a significant one.
Once I began to consider the lifespan of things, new questions emerged: what does “lifespan” mean for architecture? What does it mean for the environment? Architecture is assembled from multiple materials, each with its own temporal scale. Seen this way, architecture appears as a field composed of overlapping durations. In a garden or natural environment, there are elements with rapid cycles, like grasses and flowers, and others with longer cycles, like trees that span decades. Stone may belong to cycles of hundreds or thousands of years, while landforms extend to tens of thousands. We live surrounded by entities of vastly different temporalities.
At that moment, it began to seem that to understand architecture is also to understand time. The boundaries we tend to draw—between architecture and landscape, building and site, site and environment—began to dissolve.
To build architecture is to layer time onto a place. The accumulated time of decades, centuries, or even longer gives rise to what we perceive as the character of land. If we think of land as a place where time has been stratified, then even our distinction between new construction and renovation may appear overly narrow. Rather than approaching a place from the standpoint of architecture alone, perhaps what we should consider is what kind of temporal order we can introduce.
Yet all order is gradually undone by time. The irreversible tendency of nature toward disorder cannot be resisted. If the ongoing act of bringing temporal order to a place constitutes its history, then the present moment is part of a collective architectural act shared with those who came before us.
“This is a gift to the future. It is entirely true that everything of value ultimately remains as a gift. What other value could art have?”
Noguchi created the garden museum as a gift—to himself, and to the world.
As one who has received that gift, I have spent more than six years, since 2016, returning to Takamatsu and asking myself what constitutes value, what constitutes a place of value. To sense the time accumulated in a place, to add to it, and to pass it on with care—perhaps such acts of continuity are what give rise to lasting value.
Now, eight years later, I find myself once again working with stone in another project. It remains a material I cannot yet fully grasp. And yet, I feel that stone may still have something to teach me.
(Published in Hitotsuchi, “On Tile Architecture,” June 2024)