“Kami no Ishi (Paper Stone)” is a project by Hideyuki Nakayama and Taichi Sunayama, two architects, focusing on a stone that has no concept of size or meaning. The project began with the very simple concept of creating a stone out of paper, and is now exploring further possibilities of printing by using new materials such as wood and cloth.

The exhibition “Cat’s Narrow Road” currently being held at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art allows visitors to go through the entirety of this project, which has continued from 2017 to the present day. Hideyuki Nakayama, who has been in charge of many famous buildings, and Taichi Sunayama, a researcher of architectural design using digital technology, will discuss what is fun about continuing to create stones.

An architect is a job that requires meaning.
With paper, I want to create something that has no meaning.

The project began with the Paper Shapes Exhibition 2: Fuwafuwa, Gorogoro, Jiwajiwa held in 2017, in which three groups of young architects explored the new possibilities of paper. Initially, Takeo, a paper trading company that planned the exhibition, offered Nakayama the opportunity to “think of products using paper based on architectural thinking” and “explore the possibilities of three-dimensional objects and printing made with paper.” The very simple concept of “making stone out of paper” seems to have been born from the backlash of architectural work, where everything is questioned as to its meaning.

Nakayama: An architect’s job is to be asked why everything has to be that way, and we get the job by thoroughly explaining it with drawings and words. As a reaction to this, I wanted to do something without meaning to the fullest, at least when creating something on paper. I decided to try making a stone with no sense of meaning out of paper, and I ended up working together with Mr. Sunayama, who found it interesting.

In the past, Mr. Sunayama used physical calculations to simulate a bed mattress, and exhibited a mixed-media object with the shape of the mattress woven into the Corbusier building. There is a creepy sense of discomfort and narrative in everyday scenery, and I thought that such a balance of Sunayama’s technique and sensibility was perfect for “Kami no Ishi.”

Sunayama: After graduating from the Department of Sculpture at Tama Art University, I went to France to conduct research on creating architectural forms through computer programming at the architecture school there. I have been influenced by Mr. Nakayama’s texts since those days when I had a strong interest in the concept of architecture rather than the physically existing buildings themselves. Whenever I look at Mr. Nakayama’s texts, drawings, and architectural works, I always think that he is a rare architect who effortlessly matches what he creates with his unique concept. This is evident in even a single line drawn by Mr. Nakayama.

Using “stone” as a platform:
Encountering the bodies and perceptions of others

Because stones lying on the roadside are readily available and easily scanned, they have become 3D data and can be found on the Internet in abundance. There have been artists and designers in the past who have created something that looks like a stone, but according to Sunayama, there were few that gave the impression of depth as a work of art. “Kami no Ishi” followed a unique process of going back and forth between the physical and the digital in order to create depth in the work and differentiate it from past examples.

Sunayama: To tell the truth, with “Kami no Ishi,” Mr. Nakayama had almost completed the work simply by making drawings and giving words, so all I had to do was to work out the specific production process. Although the actual stone has countless irregularities, ranging from large circumferences to small scratches, “Kami no Ishi” is composed of no more than about 25 facets. Through repeated physical simulations, including a “portrait stone painting” competition with the occasional help of Mr. Nakayama’s office staff, we realized that the number of faces, 25, is the line that separates a “copy” from a “drawing.

Nakayama: For the “portrait stone painting,” I used a cutter to simplify a lump of Styrofoam into about 25 facets, like the beveling of a taro. Just as a portrait can be made to look like a person by capturing facial features with only a few lines, the stones were also “sketched” as much as possible to identify the features.

Sunayama: Normally, a 3D scan of a stone produces high-definition data formed by triangular polygons, but although the data is supposed to be high-definition, it does not look like a stone at all. Conversely, by inserting the process of creating a sensory simplified model, the data can now tell us that it is that stone.

It was also interesting to digitally transcribe the model of “Kami no Ishi” made by Mr. Nakayama’s office. I felt as if I was participating in an image that someone else recognized as a stone, and I felt a sense of reality in our shared perception of the stone.

Nakayama: Even if we were to make a stone out of paper, I felt that simply drawing a geometric net was somehow lacking in depth as an existence. For design, simplification is similar to making meaning. Perhaps I wanted to lodge a meaningless complexity in the process of processing data with a computer by going through an action that involves the body and matter.

Sunayama: I think the fact that another person’s body and cognition intervened gave “Kami no Ishi” an intellectual depth. The staff members of Mr. Nakayama’s office who participated in the portrait stone painting competition may have wondered many times why they were doing this. It may sound nothing special, but this work is interesting because of its limited life and physicality. The digital world is infinite, but I still think that something infinite cannot match the allure of something finite.

Creating an incongruous scale
in a world full of size scales

The following video shows the astronauts who landed on the moon aboard Apollo 16 walking toward a rock about the size of a car that can be seen in the distance. But no matter how far they walked, they could not reach the rock – in fact, the rock was further away than they had imagined and was as big as a house, not a car, as in the famous episode. Using this episode as an example, Nakayama begins to talk about the mysterious materiality of the stone.

Nakayama: For example, when we see something made by human beings, such as a house or a building, we have a fixed perception of its size as we see them on a daily basis. However, as the Apollo 16 “House Rock” episode shows, even the most able-bodied astronauts can misjudge the scale of space in a place like the moon, where there is nothing man-made that can be used as a yardstick. When I imagined what it would be like if there were houses or buildings that could not be used as a ruler for size, I thought how nice a stone was (laughs).

Sunayama: While listening to Mr. Nakayama’s story, I was reminded of open-world games in which players can move freely within a given environment. In an open-world game, the player can freely perform various actions, but creating such a game is not a matter of designing freedom, but rather designing what is not possible in the world. In other words, while architecture in real space, for example, is based on the physical conditions that already exist in this world, and creativity is found in the interaction with those conditions, the creation of architecture in a metaverse or game space, for example, must first be designed from the conditions of such a world, which is fundamentally different from the way architecture is created in reality.

Nakayama: In the metaverse, there is no concept of size, similar to the experience on the moon. For example, a person 50,000 meters tall and a person 1 centimeter tall should be able to share the same world, but it is strange that they are all scaled according to the real world. In a world that is surrounded by measures of size, I myself am interested in creating something that cannot be used as a measuring stick in terms of size, like a stone, or a scale that feels strange, from both digital and physical perspectives. For example, I am always concerned that my work, which involves creating architecture in the midst of nature, such as the ocean, huge rocks, and trees that have grown over a long period of time, which essentially has no ruler for size, may fix their scale.

Sunayama: Worlds in which conditions fluctuate in every situation, such as rocks that do not have a fixed scale, game design, and metaverse space, are interesting precisely because they are difficult to define as a world. Also, as Mr. Nakayama says, it is important to think of architecture and human creation as behavior that gives scale and measure to the world, and to have the creators themselves reflect on this behavior in order to give critical depth to what they create.

I want to use “Ki no Ishi” to create an architecture
that is not a measure of things

This project has been ongoing since 2017. In the current exhibition “Cat’s Narrow Road” at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (until May 21, 2023), in addition to “Kami no Ishi,” new works “Ki no Ishi (Wood Stone)” and “Nuno no Ishi (Cloth Stone)” are being exhibited, which explore the possibilities of printing. When asked about the future of this project, which has made a unique development from Kami no Ishi, he replied that he would like to create architecture using “Ki no Ishi.

Nakayama: For example, I would like to use “Ki no Ishi” to create an architecture that is not used as a yardstick in terms of size. This project started with paper, and we have been experimenting with printed stone textures using a large printer of about 2 meters square. Basically, any flat material that fits on the bed of the printer can be printed on, and of course, the print ratio is arbitrary, even with the same data. However, at the stage of assembling it into a three-dimensional object, for example, if it exceeds a certain size, it will not be able to stand on its own with paper. There is a clear threshold in the material world, and it is interesting in this series of experiments that the digital data physically demands other mediums (other than paper), as if to say, “If it exceeds this threshold, it can only be made of plywood.”

In the process of increasing the magnification of printing like this, the thinking expands from “Kami no Ishi” to “Ki no Ishi” and then to architecture, and a new condition emerges which is not only a physical condition but also a legal one. Since natural stone does not meet JIS standards (Japanese Industrial Standards), it cannot be used for building structures unless its strength is verified through destructive testing. However, plywood has passed the JIS standard, so “Ki no Ishi” can be used for a structure. I think there are many untested possibilities in the printing technique because what started out as “I want to make something meaningless” somehow ended up as a social rule to realize architecture.

Sunayama: Cloth is the opposite material of stone, so “Nuno no Ishi” was difficult and interesting. “Kami no Ishi,” “Ki no Ishi,” and “Nuno no Ishi” are all nothing more than a collection of ink on base materials, yet this project maximally enjoys the misalignment of pointing to them as stones, and I think it also delves into the brain mechanism of how humans perceive things.

When I was playing with NES as a child and I found a bug, I felt as if I had seen the truth of the world. Since then, I have always believed that the moment a human-constructed world develops a bug, or when its logic deviates or collapses, it reveals the essence of the world and its logic. Bugs occur on a daily basis, not only in digital spaces such as games, but also in physical spaces and in human communication, and it is in these moments that we should find richness and interest.