Under the sign of Kengo Kuma

9 September 2021

Kengo Kuma‘s idea, above all else, is “just to respect the culture and environment of the place where I am working.” This is how the architect conceived some of the most impressive and noteworthy architecture works of the last decades: with this territory-focused approach and with particular attention to sustainability. Especially in Japan, his home country, where he created buildings with renewed vigor and lightness.

A long and happy career that started after studying in Tokyo and New York, and traced today by the Japanese architect (Yokohama, 1954) in a monograph edited by Taschen with Philip Jodidio, the director of Connaissance des Arts magazine for over twenty years. “Kuma. Complete Works 1988-Today” is the XXL-sized volume with around 500 illustrations, photographies, sketches and plans through which the illustrious Asian artist and founder of Kengo Kuma & Associates analyses in detail his crucial projects and ongoing works.

Thus, page after page, his codes and priorities are revealed: from being always inspired by tradition, but anchored to the present, to the merit of having transformed technical skills and local resources into timely buildings. From his great ability of revealing unexpected qualities in materials, as proven by the Folk Art Museum of the China Academy of Arts with discarded roof tiles, to being the promoter of a new tactile architecture characterized by “engaging surfaces, innovative structures, and fluid forms, reconnecting people with the physicality of a house”.

Kuma. Complete Works 1988-Today 

By Kengo Kuma, Philip Jodidio 

Languages: English, French, German 

Hardcover cm 30,8 x 39 

460 pages, 150 euros.

On the cover image: Yusuhara Wooden Bridge Museum, Yusuhara, Kochi, Japan, 2010. Copyright: © Takumi Ota Photography

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