Jun Aoki inspired by penguins: it’s official

So what do penguins, Hitchcock movies, Alice in Wonderland, crystals, the work of American delineator and architect Hugh Ferriss and King Kong have in common? Not a lot, you would think, but in the fertile imagination of Japanese architect Jun Aoki, these are rich sources of inspiration for some of his most iconic works.

Talk to most architects about where they get their ideas from, and they will inevitably refer to client requests, green considerations, the site itself, the issue of urban density and the need to address it, materials, the location, and so on. It is hard to imagine that anyone else could cite a list of references as wonderfully bizarre and random as Aoki’s.

Aoki was in Hong Kong recently to speak about his creative process, in particular his long-term relationship with luxury goods brand Louis Vuitton, which dates back to 1998. That was when he was approached to design the Nagoya Sakae store, and the concept he came up with was a progression of his ‘volume of gas’ abstraction – and this is where the penguins come in.

Some years earlier, while strolling around London Zoo, Aoki stopped by the Penguin Pool, designed by Berthold Lubetkin in 1934 (see my previous blog on this at http://www.perspectiveglobal.com/blog/post-253-good-intentions-the-road-to-hell ).

“As I was there, I happened to exchange looks with a penguin; I had the feeling that I was being observed by penguins even as I was there to observe them,” Aoki says. “And looking at the Penguin Pool, with its curved shape and bridges, it seemed to be that there was a volume of air with the structure shaped around it.”

It is precisely this interplay and connection between gas (air) and solid (structure) which has informed much of his work since then – for more on Aoki, don’t miss the March issue of Perspective magazine.