The Geoffrey Bawa Trust is pleased to announce that this year’s Memorial Lecture will be delivered by the renowned architect Junya Ishigami. Presented annually to mark Geoffrey Bawa’s birthday, the lecture celebrates influential architectural ideas and practitioners from around the world.
Founder of the junya.ishigami+associates architectural firm, Ishigami is known for his large-scale projects that entwine the organic and the built. Ishigami completed a Master’s Degree at the Department of Architecture at Tokyo University of the Arts and worked for the renowned architectural firm Kazuyo Sejima & Associates before founding his own practice in 2024.
Ishigami’s architectural designs dissolve the boundary between the built structure and its surroundings. The completed projects are not merely buildings but interactions between structure, matter, atmospheric conditions, and time. They are frameworks where material processes, climate, and environmental dynamics shape the formation and inhabitation of space.
The Zaishui Art Museum in China’s Shandong Province is a serpentine fusion of water and form. Stretching for over a kilometer, the building’s concrete and steel frame melt into the surrounding lake, with the water appearing to flow seamlessly through the floor-to-ceiling windows and into the gallery space. The building rests lightly across the landscape, its elongated form mirroring the shifting reflections of sky, trees and water. Built in 2023, this 20,000 square meter complex serves as an exhibition space, visitor center, and shopping center.
Just north of Tokyo, near the Nasu Mountains, sits the Art Biotop Water Garden, another of Ishigami’s striking creations. Blending the curated and natural, the Water Garden was created by relocating an entire forest from a nearby site earmarked for development. In doing so, Ishigami created a paradoxical landscape of artificial and organic where trees, moss, and water come together in a density not found in nature. The 160 carefully constructed ponds sit amongst the 318 trees, including beech and quercus, species and elements that do not naturally coexist.
Other notable works by Ishigami include the 4,000 square meter Plaza at Kanagawa Institute of Technology, a gently undulating open-air space for students to relax beneath a wide, sky-light dotted ceiling; the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion in London; and the partially underground House & Restaurant in Japan, built to simulate a subterranean-like dwelling that combines family home with public restaurant.
Ishigami has been honored with several prestigious awards, including the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize (2009), the Golden Lion award for the best project at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2010), the Mainichi Design Award (2010), the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists (of fine arts), the OBEL Award by the Henrik Frode Obel Foundation (2019), the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2024) and the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize (2024). He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (2025) and received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize (2026).
The 23rd Annual Geoffrey Bawa Memorial Lecture will be held on Thursday, 23rd July at 6:30 p.m. at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, Colombo 07.
