Bonsai Architectures and Pebble-Infrastructures

Architizer News

Bonsai Architectures and Pebble-Infrastructures

February 15, 2012

Artist Takanori Aiba has been sculpting his miniature worlds for nearly a decade. His Lilliputian constructions are dense, meticulous works, detailed to a manic degree that easily diminishes that of their Disney predecessors (which the artist cites as inspiration). Aiba, who previously worked as an illustrator and architect, designing the eating hall of the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum in 1994–for which he recreated a small Japanese urban cloister circa 1958, complete with era-store fronts and fictionalized histories and landmarks–fuses sprawling networks of scaffolding, stairways, windmills, and turrets to his bonsai and suiseki mediums. Click through for more images.

The architectural flourishes are enmeshed in wild clusters of flora and rock, presenting natural barriers which force the tiny structures to react and adapt in novel ways. Stairways dart down grottoes only to resurface unexpectedly several stories down, a large dining deck takes advantage of the structural fortuitousness of branches joined at right angles, and several large rooms fill out an infrastructural shell erected to buttress a falling cliff face. Abstractions and compositional devices such as systems of proportions find little place in Aiba’s micro-architectures; they are, instead, machines of desire, wandering, opportunistic and ravenous.