YOKOMAE et BOUAYAD

Biography:
YOKOMAE et BOUAYAD is a partnership established in 2023 by the Japanese architect Takuma Yokomae and the Moroccan architect Dr. Ghali Bouayad. With each project, their practice focuses on carefully understanding the surrounding environment, and the multitude of architectural forms present. This process navigates between logic and intuition, with special attention accorded to proportions and atmospheres.

With careers balanced between academia and artistic practice over the past fifteen years, both founders have built sincere relationships with structural engineers, craftsmen, artists, curators, and researchers to imagine and build an optimistic, sustainable future where architecture becomes art.

YOKOMAE et BOUAYAD is designing a wide range of projects across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Small-scale projects include scenographies, art pavilions, and private homes; mid-scale programmes relate to collective housing and hotels, and large-scale ambitions address schools. Headquartered in Tokyo, a second office will open in Morocco in the fall of 2025.

Artwork Overview:
Generally, architecture does not move. Nevertheless, this pavilion creates shadows that evolve and shift constantly, just as nature does, creating a variety of changing spaces without moving any part of the structure.

With architectural and structural form, efficiency and logic, YOKOMAE et BOUAYAD draw their inspiration from how nature generates movement, shadows, and patterns, particularly those created by clouds and branches. The duo incorporates local concepts that multiply, mix, and overlap in this piece.

Considering the ever-changing direction of the sun, the soft movement of the upper element - an ultra-lightweight stainless steel mesh inspired by Kawachi (an artisanal cotton weaving technique of Japan) - and the multitude of vertical ultra-thin columns gentle swaying and dancing with the soft wind of Abu Dhabi, the pavilion gives life to constantly changing shadows, of different shapes and patterns, transparency gradations, resolutions and scales.

Imagining a space between the natural and the artifact, the impact of the architectural installation on the space is perceived in its experimentation with shadows. The choreography of a cloud, dancing shadows pavilion is not a mere reproduction of nature, but the result of the architects’ point of view: a new phenomenology of shadows.