Project by Zachary Poncher @Zach_Poncher
Situated in the dense jungles of Ishigaki Island in the Yaeyama Archipelago, Japan, a fabric of gardens, orchards, and farming plots extends through the jungle, forming a soft boundary between the wildness of the site and the residency it sustains. This cultivated network is both the primary path through the site and its source of ingredients, the farm as infrastructure, the farm as larder. Rooted in a holistic approach to farming and experimental cooking, the residency draws from both local Ishigaki and broader Japanese culinary tradition, comprising a main residency building, a roadside restaurant, a dormitory, and a series of cabins, each porous to the farm and jungle surrounding it. At the core of the residency, the main building is the point at which the farm is drawn fully inward, received, processed, and transformed. Here the traditional idea of a kitchen is deconstructed into its constituent parts, each room holding its own dedicated program: a test kitchen, a bakery, a room for pickling and curing. All of this is gathered beneath a single expansive roof drawn from local vernacular tradition, a covered ground that pulls the outside in and makes the work of the farm nourishing.
