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City life is an assemblage of easy and convenient functions that we tend to take for granted. Yet, buried under all those functions, the landscape goes on quietly existing in urban space. Even here in Minami-Aoyama, in the heart of central Tokyo, the hilly terrain, the waterways flowing underground, the endless sky overhead, and the plants changing their appearance in response to the weather and seasons still make their presence felt. With this in mind, I have made an organic landscape out of the various “small natures” hiding in the city, the things we never see but which are always there around us.

A bar made out of a landscape has no standard tables or chairs, no level floors or ceilings, no vertical walls. Landforms of varying heights alternately become tables, chairs, small rooms, dishes, or scenery. The diverse scales of time and space that the landscape produces open up new ways of being in a bar. When we enter a landscape, we can enjoy the scenes around us while climbing hills, gathering nuts, picking flowers, collecting drops of water from leaves, or spreading out a blanket to lie down. Like plants and animals, which freely make their homes, find sustenance, and rest in nature, we too can make our own place, have a drink, and share conversations in the landscape as bar.

Evoking the earth’s undulating surface, the rising and sloping organic forms generate spatial continuity and depth and become compositional elements of the scene. The hidden landscape of the city extends into architectural space to create new scenes and take on new relations with people. These in turn show us the possibilities of using and experiencing space as you would a landscape.

Now made visible, this organic landscape becomes part of the city through its engagement with people and subtly connects back to the hidden landscape.