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Forests sprawl over ninety percent of Yusuhara’s landscape, the mountainous Japanese town in Kochi prefecture, home to just over 3000 people. Its stacked rice fields, the Senmaida of Kanzaiko, were described by writer Ryotaro Shiba on his visit as “an inheritance not to fall behind the Great Wall of China”. But, Yusuhara, hugged by the forests and close to the skies (its nickname is “Town Above the Clouds”) has many more inheritances. It is home to the delightful, experimental, and predominantly wooden structures of visionary modern Japanese architect Kengo Kuma.

The spectacle, such as it is, of a Kengo Kuma artifice accumulates in the relationship between form, function, and nature. The way the landscape hugs the structure, the way his humility allows for a kind of grace to flow in into the objects; it is as though Kengo suffuses the space, his modesty as a person flowing into his practice. We asked Kengo what, to him, the meaning of good taste was: “Humility”.
Kengo’s aesthetic—incorporating ancient materials, freethinking in its simplicity, praising the osmotic boundaries of interior and exterior—is applied as much to monuments of cultural import to cultural oddities. The Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center in Tokyo, his experimental, 148-foot-long cedar Wooden Bridge Museum (in Yusuhara), but also those of his latticed cypress forms, housing a pineapple cakeshop in the Tokyo neighbourhood of Minami-Aoyama, all these have furthered the vernacular of Japanese and world architecture.

Kengo’s romance with architecture, like all good love stories, begins with un coup de foudre. It is a rather simple story, one he can recite excellently, because he still adores the building—Kenzo Tage’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium, in Tokyo—so ardently: “When I was 10, I saw the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo by Kenzo Tange. That is the moment I decided I wanted to be an architect. Since this moment, architecture has evolved me everyday of my life.”

There is a deep wellspring of affection for Kengo in Japan. In some five decades as an architect, the unassuming author of his own timeless style, he best describes his efforts thus: “I am making a conscious effort to create something.” Founding his eponymous firm in Tokyo in 1990, Kengo had studied under architectural theorist Hiroshi Hara, with a fellowship at Columbia University under his belt. At the time, the yen was soaring, though beginning to feel the first shivers of mortality, postmodernism was dead (according, at least, to Kuma), and a fecund relationship thrived between Kengo and fellow modern architects was blooming.

It has been like this for Kengo, architecture following from life, but the vicissitudes of our modern world have upturned the definition of his trade: “The climate crisis has pushed my intuition, which is to design my architecture in wood.” It’s time. Reorganizing the principles of form in favor of environmental design, alight in his rural, prolific works in Yusuhara, Kengo’s elegant and modern buildings will always feel at home in their landscapes; whether we will follow, however, is another question: “To be honest, I want to forget about modern architecture….[In the future] People will go away from architecture, and go back to the field.”

By Jonathan Mahon-Heap for Semaine.