Kengo Kuma   Norway   In what is one of Norway’s oldest cities, birthplace of its most universal man of letters, the project of Kengo Kuma – in collaboration with the Norwegian firm Mad Arkitekter – has placed first in the competition to build a library devoted to the pla

Kengo Kuma   Japan   Situated next to Yoyogi Park in the Tokyo ward Shibuya, the Meiji Jingu Shrine is a Shinto temple dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji (1852-1912) and his consort, Emperor Shôken (1849-1914). Blending with the surrounding trees, the new

Kengo Kuma   Japan   Yusuhara, a small town on the border of the mountainous province of Kochi, in the southwest of Japan, is often described as a ‘village above the clouds.’ Over the past years, the studio of Kengo Kuma has developed a compound of buildings there, such

Kengo Kuma   Turkey   Assembled together with wood strips, a series of stacked boxes house the new Odunpazari Museum of Modern Art in the Turkish city of Eskisehir, a university town with a large young population and a lively and active atmosphere. The plot is on the boun

Kengo Kuma   Japan   Located between the gardens of the Meiji Shrine – a Shinto sanctuary – and the Imperial Palace, in the heart of Tokyo, the new National Stadium contributes to preserving the natural environment of this historical area through restraint in size and th

Kengo Kuma   United States   At Portland Japanese Garden, designed by professor Takuma Tono in 1967, the new Cultural Village connects a sequence of buildings to offer a complete and uninterrupted journey from the city to the top of the hill. The ensemble includes a first pavili

Kengo Kuma   France   The new headquarters of Blue Ice, a company that designs and makes climbing and mountain equipment, is in Les Houches, a small village in the French Alps, close to the Mont Blanc. A wide roof marks the design, and follows the natural slope of the sit

Kengo Kuma   Australia   Surrounded by high-rises and residential blocks with shops in the lower podium, the project is conceived as a hub centralizing the circulations in the busy area of Darling Harbor, in Sydney. The cylindrical form addresses the need to create an urban

Kengo Kuma   China   Yangcheng Lake – located three kilometers from Suzhou in Jiangsu Province – is famous for producing the best mitten crab in China, a seawater crustacean that is considered to be a rare world delicacy. The growing interest in gastronomic tourism has s

Kengo Kuma   China   Zhang Xiaochun In September 2015, with an exhibition themed ‘Heavenly Creations: A World of Southern Rural Crafts,’ the Folk Art Museum of the China Academy of Arts – a project designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma – officially opened to the

Kengo Kuma   Japan   Surrounded by a small forest and a prairie, this hospital specialized in rehabilitation is located next to Narita International Airport, Japan’s largest, 50 kilometers west of Tokio. This low-rise hospital, with just two floors, is arranged around tw

‘This will kill that.’ In Victor Hugo’s prophecy – which was also McLuhan’s – ‘this’ referred to books and ‘that’ to cathedrals. It was a process of creative destruction that lasted as long as it took digitalization to arrive, and with it a new proph

Kengo Kuma   The writer Haruki Murakami, a friend of mine, has written that both short stories and novels are indispensable for him. He develops the ideas that he discovers during the process of writing short stories in order to write novels. And when he is writi

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Monumental or minuscule, the oeuvre of Kengo Kuma could be described as pixelated craftsmanship. Its creative explosion, encompassing all scales and extending over four continents, is governed by a devotion to the material rigor of construction and t

Manuel Blanco   In the world of fashion, luxury is the ultimate quality, but it must be understood that it is not possible to create a luxury brand ex novo. Luxury has two inseparable ingredients: brand tradition, centenarian in many cases, and the careful use today

After a protracted process, a period of eight years, that has not been spared its dose of controversy (in 2015 it was announced that the building’s real cost would exceed the initially budgeted amount of 50 million euros by a good 70%), Scotland’s ow

The firm Kengo Kuma Associates has within the grounds of the Portland Japanese Gardens, opened in 1967, inaugurated a Cultural Village composed of four buildings of modest scale with tiered green roofs recalling pagodas. The design, which presents a

Li Xiangning   Zhang Xiaochun   Xitou Village, hidden in the green hills and clear waters of Baoxi Town, Longquan City (Zhejiang Province), is one of the birthplaces of the Celadon ceramic culture. Inconvenient transportation somewhat shields it from the influence of rapid urbaniza

In the wake of the shelving of Zaha Hadid’s project, the Japan Sports Council organized a second competition for the design of the new Tokyo National Olympic Stadium in the Shinjuku ward of the capital, and the winner was the Japanese architect Kengo

Back in the 13th century, Marco Polo described Hangzhou, situated on China’s eastern coast, as “the finest and most splendid city in the world.” Later it went into decline and remained down for centuries. Finally, recent years have seen there an upwa

Juhani Pallasmaa   Kengo Kuma has expressed a critical view of the notion of abstraction: “The world is being suppressed by abstract thinking. How can we escape from this suppression?” He is also concerned about “the steep slope called abstraction,” and names ‘anti-abs

Kengo Kuma   On 11 March 2011, a powerful earthquake hit eastern Japan, triggering a giant tsunami that struck the coastal area and killed more than 20,000 people. Although I was not in Japan at the time, this disaster was not at all someone else’s problem. Since

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The architecture of Kengo Kuma is an exemplary exercise in relinquishment. Though in his work material is particularly important, each and every one of the projects expresses a will to attain bareness that we can only call spiritual. The dissolution

Diogo Brito   Addressing Design Process

Kenneth Frampton   Complete Works

Materials, Structures, Details