SUSTAINASCAPE — a porous ground in ishigaki

SUSTAINASCAPE — a porous ground in ishigaki is a private garden in the old town of Ishigaki City, Okinawa. The clients asked for two things: a wall to screen the view from the main road about 100 metres away, and a table with chairs for barbecues. They wanted to watch birds and to keep parking where it was. The project answered all of this as one ground.

No wall was built and no furniture was bought. The ground itself was lifted into a hill of cast concrete that screens the sightline and descends without a seam into the height of a table. Fixed seats of the same concrete surround it. Wall, furniture and paving are one cast landform. The screen height was halved from a planned three metres to 1.5 metres; the rest of the screening is grown. This planted boundary revives a local precedent: in the Yaeyama Islands, villages were once ringed by hogo, lines of trees that shielded houses from wind. The old town had lost that ring to urban growth. The garden restores it at the scale of one house.

From the engawa, shallow steps descend to a continuous tiled floor that runs from barbecue to parking and rises smoothly into the hill. 26 openings pierce the concrete and tile. In the tile, each opening holds a mound of earth that absorbs rain; on the hill, soil follows the slope, so planting rises directly out of the cast surface. Seven species are planted in a gradient, low near the engawa and taller toward the hill, so from the table the green reads as terrain. Flowering species give scent and colour beside the seats; taller trees bring shade and birds. The concrete remains as cast, without coating or cladding, and its curves carry the marks of the island-made formwork.

The garden stays fully open to both streets. Toward the main road, the ground only rises to screen the view; nothing is closed. Toward the lane, the concrete steps down as the backrest of the seats and stays open, so neighbours and children use the garden freely, and a private lot works as a small town park. Parking sits on the same tiled floor, not in a separate utility zone. Everything was cast in place with concrete and formwork sourced on the island; no furniture crossed the sea. With no coating, cladding or mechanically fixed parts, there is little to strip, repaint or replace under typhoon and salt wind, and even the furniture cannot blow away. The environmental logic is counted, not assumed: 25 m³ of concrete and 159 m² of tile produce about twelve tonnes of embodied CO2. Based on first-year growth, the planting repays the landform's share in seventeen years and the whole garden's in twenty-seven, then absorbs 0.36 tonnes a year.

The clients asked for two things. What was built is one ground.