From Villager to Village Architect

Aki Ishida moved with her family from the bustling metropolis of Tokyo to the winter wonderland of Minnesota in time for her to start middle school. Needless to say, it was not the easiest of transitions. At that time anything Japanese in the Midwest was rare, so in 1988 — Mori no Ike’s founding year — when Aki heard about a Japanese summer camp starting in northern Minnesota, she applied.   Over the four years that followed, Aki was a part of building everything from the meal song to the credit curriculum. Now an architect, she is helping to build the Japanese Language Village again. This time, quite literally. Ishida/Crandall LLC (Aki and her partner David Crandall) is the firm designing Mori no Ike’s architecturally authentic home on Turtle River Lake near Bemidji, Minn.

With first-hand knowledge of Japan as well as life at the Villages, Aki has the unique combination of skills necessary to seamlessly integrate architecture with language and culture education. Having grown up in Japan, she knows what makes living in Japan significant. At the same time, she has intimate knowledge of the Concordia Language Villages pedagogy. Her plans for the Village are a marriage of the two, allowing villagers to learn through daily experiences.

Whether it is a chemotherapy center in a Brooklyn brownstone or the educational spaces she’s created in the plans for Mori no Ike, she sees her work as improving quality of life. About this project, Aki marvels, “It is amazing that an organization that influenced me as a teen is now a client and I have an opportunity to give back what I learned as a counselor. I think of it as my version of a contribution to global, multi-cultural education.”

Aki holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University. She has worked with many notable architects, including Pritzker Prize winner I.M. Pei. She has found her niche with a clientele looking for Japanese-inspired design or Japanese people living in the United States eager to work with an architect who understands Japanese and Japanese life. Together with her clients, she explores contemporary interpretations of traditional Japanese spaces.

She credits Mori no Ike as helping her grow into the confident architect she is today. She remembers working on building a mikoshi together with four, much larger male counselors. After feeling pushed aside long enough, she reported to then dean Patricia Murasaki Thornton that she was losing ground. Murasaki‘s response was that this was something she would have to deal with for the rest of her life, so she had better start practicing asserting herself. This “tough love” was just what she needed, Aki recalls, and she says this advice was something she thought about often as she was starting out in the male-dominated profession of architecture.

Aki believes that she has continued teaching alongside her design work thanks to the passion she acquired for education at Mori no Ike. At the Village, Aki developed the art program and wrote the first credit curriculum together with founding dean Ann Junko McCarthy. Now Aki is an instructor at the two top design schools in the country: Parsons The New School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design. Not only does she beautify the world on her own, she continues to inspire others to create meaningful spaces around them as well. 

clv@cord.edu
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