Platinum A' Design Award Winner 2023
The suspended vertical elements in Masato Kure's installation function as a sophisticated three-dimensional translation of traditional threshold semiotics, where boundaries exist not as impermeable barriers but as gradated zones of transition inviting passage while marking distinction between spatial realms—this permeable membrane strategy resonates with deep cultural associations to bamboo forests, rain imagery, and the Japanese architectural concept of ma or meaningful interval, where space between elements carries significance equal to the elements themselves. The chromatic choice of pristine white for the vertical rods activates multiple symbolic registers simultaneously: white traditionally signifying purity, spiritual clarity, new beginnings, and blankness as potential across Eastern and Western traditions, while also functioning within contemporary design language as the ultimate neutral, the color of gallery walls and museum spaces that refuses to compete with exhibited content, suggesting that the architecture itself aspires to service rather than dominance. The verticality itself carries archetypal weight—vertical orientation suggesting aspiration, growth, transcendence, the connection between earth and sky, the axis mundi linking grounded human experience to elevated consciousness, while the sheer multiplication of vertical elements transforms singular symbolic gesture into environmental condition, creating forest rather than tree, rainfall rather than single drop. The rhythmic repetition without exact uniformity evokes natural systems rather than mechanical production, suggesting organic growth patterns where individual variation occurs within systematic order, the spacing variations potentially encoding the balance between individual expression and collective harmony that characterizes certain cultural values around social organization and aesthetic philosophy. The warm timber platforms anchored by amber underglow establish grounding counterpoint to the ascending white elements, embodying earth-element stability and warmth against the cooler, more ethereal quality of the suspended installation, this temperature and material opposition potentially suggesting traditional dualities: earth and heaven, body and spirit, permanence and transience, weight and lightness, opacity and transparency. The graduated density transformation from left compression to right openness may encode journey symbolism, the passage from complexity toward clarity, from density toward spaciousness, from uncertainty toward revelation, offering visitors experiential metaphor for processes of understanding, purification, or discovery as they move through the space. The integration of functional lighting within the architectural gesture suggests the contemporary design principle that utility and beauty need not oppose but can fuse, the practical necessity of illumination becoming the poetic medium of spatial atmosphere, potentially reflecting philosophical positions that reject Cartesian dualism between function and aesthetics. The ceiling grid revealed above the suspended elements, rather than being concealed, might signify honesty about structural systems and installation methodology, the visible order acknowledging the human planning and engineering that enables seemingly magical atmospheric effects, refusing the complete illusion in favor of legible construction that respects viewer intelligence. The reflective floor surfaces multiplying vertical elements in subtle mirror-ghosts could evoke traditional associations between reflection and contemplation, the doubling suggesting layers of perception, the relationship between appearance and reality, or the reciprocal relationship between environment and inhabitant where each shapes and reflects the other, while the transparency variations created by density modulation potentially reference traditional screening devices that simultaneously reveal and conceal, offering layered viewing where multiple spatial depths remain visible but distinct, perhaps encoding cultural comfort with ambiguity, multiplicity, and the coexistence of various truths within single visual fields.
Deji Cultural Complex provides a fusion of cultural arts and commercial facilities. It has six extensive facilities including an art museum, a museum, a bookstore, shops, and a café on its top 7300 m2 floor. The coexistence of these facilities allows customers to stop by at one they would not have otherwise visited. What makes The Triangle. JP's design innovation is that they entirely got rid of walls between spaces. By eliminating partitions, it freed the space from having boundaries between inside and outside giving customers a little "preview" before entering the space.