Kengo Kuma   Japan   Fifteen homes are stacked on the slope of Mt. Okura, overlooking the city of Sapporo (Hokkaido). The stepped volumes are set apart from one another just enough for all the units to get natural light and ventilation, and also optimal views of the surr

Kengo Kuma   Spain   Taking advantage of its strategic position on the border of old town and the new city, the project seeks to become the green heart of Pontevedra. The light roof, inspired by the original one, articulates the whole complex and shelters the public area

Kengo Kuma   Japan   Founded in the year 1958, Snow Peak is a manufacturer of climbing apparel and gear with headquarters in the region of Niigata, a popular spot for winter activities like skiing and visits to the traditional hot springs called onsen. The mountainous la

Kengo Kuma   Albania   Located 25 kilometers from Saranda, very near Albania’s south border with Greece, the Butrint National Park is a natural place with archaeological remains and a high a degree of biodiversity, including within it Lake Butrint and the Vivari Channel, w

Kengo Kuma K-Studio   Greece   The history of the museum, which is about burying, concealing, and revealing objects, inspires the new design. The ground is elevated to unveil a large subterranean space, a route of the senses defined by a gradient of light and warm, earthy textures

Kengo Kuma Javier Villar Ruiz   Spain   The building takes advantage of its location in Logroño, at the point where the pilgrim route to Santiago enters the city, to create a public staircase connecting the street to a garden roof that serves as a deck for views of La Rioja's capital and t

Kengo Kuma   Denmark   The H.C. Andersen Hus museum in Odense had a preliminary presentation in June 2021 and has now officially opened. The new facilities – all of 5,600 square meters – rise beside the house where Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the Danish author of

Kengo Kuma   Mexico   An uninterrupted avian premise supplies fresh eggs to residents of Casa Wabi, a foundation that seeks to create a small community of artists on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Grids made of charred wooden boards form a permeable openwork that protects the fe

Kengo Kuma   Japan   Halfway through Kintaro Fujimi, a popular hiking trail outside the city of Oyama, the Japanese firm headed by Kengo Kuma has built Oath Hill Park, a rest spot with views of Mount Fuji. The umbrella-shaped pavilions include public toilets. The timber

Kengo Kuma   France   The building rises from the ground as a continuation of the metropolitan park, creating an observation platform over the garden and the road. Inside it will house a conference center and two hotels that aim to connect people and revitalize the new di

Kengo Kuma   France   The project called to build a contemporary gallery to protect the western portal of the Gothic cathedral of Angers, where precious polychromatic sculptures from the 12th and the 17th centuries have been recently discovered. To create a harmonious dia

Kengo Kuma   Japan   The unobstructed space inside a shed with a striking roof is home to a school for environmental studies that uses the building itself as a lesson on sustainability. Exemplifying restrained use of forest resources, the structure of V-forming pillars w

Kengo Kuma   Japan   At the foot of the ancestral castle of Oka, a small information center tells the history of the enclave beneath an expressive play of roofs clad in a lattice of smoked bamboo. A bamboo gallery marks the garden’s boundary, leading to an elevator that

Kengo Kuma   Japan   A temporary space for open-air events in a residential area of central Tokyo features a vibrant lattice executed with oblong panels of cross-laminated cedarwood. Beneath its translucent skin of plastic resin fins, the pavilion features a recreation a

Kengo Kuma   Spain   To enrich the experience of visitors to the iconic building, an emergency staircase is walled with undulating aluminum link curtains, in what is a new take on sensual Modernisme lines. Paying tribute to the decoration of Gaudí’s light well, the insta

Kengo Kuma   Norway   The curved building, devoted to Henrik Ibsen, is located on the edges of the park, with which it establishes a relationshop through large windows and several accesses. The typical Norwegain wood tile roof tilts towards the park and rises towards the

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   Portugal   Inspired in the edge strip surrounding traditional Japanese houses, known as engawa, the project creates a social space in the shade that connects the Modern Art Center and the gardens of the Gulbenkian Foundation. 

Kengo Kuma   France   The vertical timber elements, which function at the same time as light- and structure-filtering pieces, support a ventilated facade that covers the exhibition spaces and gives the project a unique and sober image that echoes its surroundings. A lobb

Kengo Kuma   Denmark   Water – its different states, the reflections of light and shadows on its surface, and the humid atmosphere it creates – is the guiding thread of this proposal that doesn’t intend to create just one object, but an experience in the form of landscape,

Kengo Kuma   Switzerland   The 700 rooms of the Grand Morillon student residence in Geneva are organized in two volumes perforated by a footpath that ascends gradually from the ground level, giving access to the shared programs.

Kengo Kuma   Denmark   In the center of Odense, the home city of fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen, a series of wood-clad cylindrical volumes are interconnected to create a continuous route from the gardens to the museum.

Kengo Kuma   France   Located on the left bank of the Seine River, by the National Library, the building is clad with a pixelated skin of wood and vegetation, and arranges a high-end hotel and a youth hostel around a lush interior garden.

Vitruvius wrote that where building is concerned, human beings owe much to animals, the hut and the cave being versions of more primitive architectures: the nest crafted by birds, and the burrow dug by mammals. This essential similarity has been ackn

Time   Kenjiro Hosaka   Kengo Kuma champions an ideal of “losing architecture”—intricate buildings that disappear into their environs—although it’s hard to miss the new National Stadium in Japan when walking through the heart of Tokyo. His stylistic fingerprints can be seen

The opening ceremony for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo has taken place in the Japan National Stadium, a work of Kengo Kuma, which presents a sophisticated composition of timber trusses and vegetation in its galleries. Sport events mark our everyday

When the eyes of the world see the Olympic flame in the cauldron of the Japan National Stadium, many will look at the sophisticated branches of its timber trusses and the soothing foliage of its galleries, and recognize the material discipline and lo

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isabel Rodríguez   Kengo Kuma belongs to the generation of Japanese architects that has known to uphold a fully modern architecture without relinquishing tradition. A defender of local values in a globalized world, Kuma has centered his work on the quality of materials

Lys Villalba   A través de 21 entrevistas a 21 arquitectos japoneses de tres generaciones, nacidos en las décadas de 1950 (Kengo Kuma, Kazuyo Sejima), de 1960 (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Ryue Nishizawa) y de 1970 (Junya Ishigami, Go Hasegawa), How to make a Japanese Hous

La propuesta del japonés Kengo Kuma se ha impuesto sobre los otros cinco proyectos finalistas —los austriacos Delugan Meissl, los noruegos Snohetta, los americanos Steven Holl y REX, y los escoceses Sutherland Hussey— en el concurso para la sede esco

En 2006 Kengo Kuma recibió el encargo de construir un centro cultural y un museo dedicados al castillo de Kanayama, una fortaleza del siglo XV situada sobre una colina en la ciudad de Ota, en la prefectura de Gunma. El edificio que alberga ambos usos

Fermín González Blanco   El arquitecto Miguel Fisac, fallecido hace ahora cuatro años, protagoniza dos publicaciones recientes, ambas esperadas. Por un lado, un libro editado por Ricardo Sánchez Lampreave para el Ministerio de la Vivienda con ocasión del Premio Nacional de A

Con el lema ‘Granatum’, el proyecto del equipo formado por los estudios Kengo Kuma y Alonso Hernández ha resultado ganador del concurso convocado por la Junta de Andalucía para la construcción del Gran Espacio Escénico de Granada. El nuevo edificio,

Diogo Brito   Addressing Design Process

Kenneth Frampton   Complete Works

Materials, Structures, Details