The discipline of the earth

Project Kengo Kuma
Photos and text Sergio Pirrone

In Japan, a former rice warehouse becomes a work of public architecture, a meeting place and exhibition facility. Kengo Kuma crafts a work in Ooya stone, a refined lesson on the relationship between nature and architecture. The importance of the site, the relativity of materials, physical limitations as creative stimuli are the themes brilliantly approached in his recent talk at the XXIII UIA World Congress in Turin. Tired, disappointed by indifference and lies, irritated by the arrogance of her offspring, the Earth will sweep away man’s deadly sins. Thirsting for respect and dignity, in unstable balance, she listens to the suppressed voices of her places, her spirits, and gazes in horror at her disfigured, unrecognizable features. Like the pixie dust and relativity of the genius Albert, concrete could have contributed to better the world, had the world not been plagued with partial minds. So in Japan, in a sea of gray cement, the ‘swan song’ has the vigor of a sob that echoes in conscious minds. Like the mind of Kengo Kuma. A life spent at the service of careful change, against inert habits, convinced that the future comes directly from the past. That architecture needs to be dismantled, rethought in its original principles, reworked according to images of overlaid thought. He praises the pure meaning of the ambiguous, installing materic layers that are skillfully distanced, advance and recede, thicken and thin. They seem to be reminders of that exclusively Japanese visual sense, where each individual element composes the architectural whole and maintains, always, its own perceptive distance, its own physical independence. Kengo loves bamboo, water, wood, glass, stone. He refines steel and relegates concrete to clear auxiliary functions. He lightens his architecture with air and place, not matter. From the Nagasaki Prefecture Art Museum to the Lotus House, all the way to the Ginzan Onsen Fujiya, he listens to the sense of the place, that genius loci so often discussed and so seldom understood. One day he took the train to Hoshakuji, a small station with an antique look, two stops from Utsunomiya, two hours to the north of Tokyo. In front of the solitary tracks he saw, next to the site that would host the Chokkura Plaza, an abandoned rice warehouse, built by craftsmen in Ooya stone. The image entered his thoughts, sustaining him in his urban study of the site, and led to the conception of a public work, a place of meeting and exhibition, to represent the city. He recalled that Frank Lloyd Wright had used the same stone, stone like earth, for the Imperial Palace of Tokyo many years earlier, and he began to work on its particular porous qualities. He built a tectonic sponge that spontaneously emerges from the ground, sublimating it in the landscape, toward the blue sky. He composed a work of harmony and comprehension of the surrounding natural world, as soft as the breathing of the earth on which it rests, free of the arrogance of architecture that has to impose itself. The long rectangle maintains the simple, constant rhythm of solids and voids, which below a protruding steel sheet permeate the surroundings, absorbing and filtering the light. Amidst narrow passages that open onto large exhibition rooms with dividers of greenery and lime, the perspectives fly inside and through a work of architecture that welcomes men and women into its continuity. Warm and porous, its textures are the woven patterns of a basket that patiently varies its colors and consistency, adapting to the progress of the day. The sun will yellow the stone diamonds that are both finish and structure, while the slender diagonal steel slabs will sustain the progressive adaptation of the edifice. Having eliminated any ornament or aesthetic makeup, the constructive system, partially composed of translucent walls of corrugated PVC, is nude, raw, like Mother Nature. Her forthright discipline meditates on the merciful meaning that forgives fools, but also issues a warning: she can only stand so much. Her fate will be the fate of all of us.