Landscape Architecture: EARTHSCAPE
Project Name: Central Government Building No.7
Completion: 2007
Location: 3-2-2 Kasumigaseki Chiyoda-ku Tokyo, Japan (at the Kasumigaseki Common Gate)
Client: Nomura Real Estate Development
Participants in planning: Architect / Kume Sekkei, Taisei Corporation, Nippon Steel Corporation
Landscape(total) / Ohtori Consultants
Type: Government building plaza, Art works
Photo credit: Photo/Shigeki Asanuma, Stylist/Daisuke Hara, Hair & Make up/INA, Model/Yumiko Hara, Clothes/DURAS, HISUI, LAKIC SHOWROOM, TANY
Earthscape created three works at the Central Government Building No.7 in the site of Kasumigaseki Common Gate.
The memory of the land is engraved in these steps. Looking up from below, the steps become a single chronological chart. Memories of this location and a record of Japan’s cultural and scientific accomplishments to date are engraved in the risers, which have been polish-finished with black granite. Depending on the position of the sun, the contemporary cityscape, with office buildings side-by-side, is reflected in the polish-finished risers, revealing a scene where history and contemporaneity intersect.
Photo credit: Photo/Shigeki Asanuma, Stylist/Daisuke Hara, Hair & Make up/INA, Model/Shing02, Clothes/N4
By sitting on and touching this chair, you can experience the temperature (seasonal and global-warming) of the earth. The materials do not have any inherent coloration — their color is formed by light waves and the reflexivity and absorptivity of the material. The bench, which is a minimalist cube made from stones in the gray scale between white and black, reveals the minute differences between each stone’s reflexivity and absorptivity, and demonstrates the relationships between light and color, and the heat energy that light possesses. In the middle of summer, the white cubes completely reflect light waves, and are pleasingly cool to the touch. In the winter, the black cubes absorb plenty of light, providing warmth to people who sit on them. In this way, people can have their own conversations with the sun through the personal experience of sitting on the cubes. It also functions as a means of measuring the earth’s temperature, since more people sit on the white cubes in the summer and the black cubes in the winter.
Before the new Central Government Building, there used to be an old Ministry of Education Building here. We engraved onto the stone chair the shadow of the buildings and plants from July 11th, 2003, 1:47 PM and 15 seconds, before the old building was knocked down. This engraved shadow overlaps with the shadow of the current buildings and plants, and brings to mind memories of the location, and the flow of time. Photo credit: Photo/Shigeki Asanuma, Stylist/Daisuke Hara, Hair & Make up/INA, Model/Yumiko Hara, Clothes/matohu, DURAS, DURAS ambient, HISUI, LAKIC SHOWROOM
