How Ichio Matsuzawa designed the almost-invisible bar defining Art Week Tokyo 2025

Ichio Matsuzawa has spent his career questioning what architecture can be when it stops trying to be solid, permanent, or even entirely visible. Since establishing his independent practice, the Tokyo-based architect has cultivated a reputation for projects that exist at the threshold of perception, from temporary installations at Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion to the Art Houses on Inujima. His recent installation for Art Week Tokyo’s bar offered a concentrated expression of this ongoing enquiry: a work of what he calls formless architecture, defined not by walls or volume but by the changing relationships between people, light, motion, and the city itself.

Ichio Matsuzawa: Architecture at the edge of perception

He created the bar with a series of curved, three-millimetre acrylic sheets, each a two-by-four-metre panel with 94 per cent transparency. They hovered at the edge of consciousness, present only when they caught the light, distorted a likeness or, momentarily, eclipsed a moving body.

The panels were heat-formed in an industrial oven using steel moulds, a process as delicate as it was unpredictable, as the acrylic became almost liquid when heated, making the ultimate curves impossible to control. Matsuzawa embraced the risk, allowing ‘beautiful accidents’ to shape the final forms, discarding everything that felt too rigid, precise, or artificial. What remained was a series of ephemeral thresholds that appeared and dissolved as visitors moved through the space.

This is where Matsuzawa drew a line between architecture and sculpture. Objects, he commented, are static. Architecture is perpetual: it changes with people, climate, sound, and time. In the bar, nothing stayed still. From the street, shadows of trees rippled across the acrylic, and echoes bent and multiplied. The breeze pushed both surfaces and images out of alignment. ‘New, mirage-like spaces are constantly being generated,’ he explained.

The transparency also blurred the divide between inside and out, a deliberate strategy given the bar’s street-level site in central Tokyo, which became part of the architecture, not merely the backdrop. Nature, too, entered the framework: wind, branches, sunlight, passing cyclists, and the casual choreography of pedestrians.

To counter the coolness of the acrylic, Matsuzawa designed stools and tables wrapped in richly coloured Afghan textiles, introducing tactility, warmth, and cultural layering. A soundscape by composer Yusuke Nakano completed the multisensory environment.

Matsuzawa, who has quietly built up a reputation for projects that question material presence and spatial perception, saw the AWT Bar as part of a philosophical enquiry into architecture as experience rather than form. ‘Each visitor encounters a different space, depending on their movements, their timing, their sensitivity,’ he said. ‘The work isn’t complete until someone inhabits it.’

The bar served cocktails designed by artists, including Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group and Tsuyoshi Ozawa, and snacks by chef Shinobu Namae, including Seaweed Jambon Beurre made with Suji-Aonori seaweed butter and two kinds of seaweed pickles, but the bar’s real takeaway was spatial. In creating architecture that existed only through perception rather than solidity, Matsuzawa inverted conventional notions of what a building should be.

Rather than defining space, his near-invisible acrylic panels dissolved it – making the architectural experience something visitors sensed rather than saw, felt rather than touched. For an architect committed to spaces that emerge from sensation rather than structure, the AWT Bar wasn’t simply a commission. It was a manifesto.

imoffice.net