“After corona, we have entered a period where the role of architecture must consider how the place and humans can be connected.” (Architect Kengo Kuma)

Mariko Azuma, for JAPAN Forward

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Ise Jingu in Mie Prefecture, a highly venerated site known as the heart and soul of Japan’s Shinto history. While walking through the sprawling keidai (shrine grounds), I experienced a moment’s repose, surrounded by lush, looming cedar trees, cypress, and low-spreading camphor and sakaki evergreens.

Sunlight poured out over the deep greens, emitting gentle beams of light filtered by layers of soft, earthy colors juxtaposed with the rough, shadowed textures of the ancient tree trunks. Along with the wooden shrine structures themselves, the Jingu’s forest felt magnificently austere, and elegant as well as powerfully energetic: a forest that is indeed breathing.

Upon my return back to the steady urban context of Kyoto, I found myself gazing up at Ace Hotel Kyoto inside of Shinpuhkan, which opened during the summer of 2020. Shinpuhkan is based around a former telephone company redesigned by renowned architect, Kengo Kuma into an upscale shopping, hotel, and theater complex. Despite the vastly disparate context and scale, there is a resonance between the spatial experience of Ise Jingu’s forest and the commercial built environment of Shinpuhkan.

For one, there is the noticeably generous presence of wood. But it is not just this material element that links the two sites. There is the response drawn out through the use of wood.

Sunlight is received and then let loose to playfully emanate in between the gaps, the corners, along the lines, and amid the points of intersecting planes. The wooden beams of Ace Hotel Kyoto are assembled in layers of interlocked joinery supporting large, spacious eaves, guiding the sunlight entering in, a characteristic commonly found in traditional Japanese architecture.

Shinpuhkan’s affinity in responding to nature is representative of Kuma’s recurrent design exploration, one that is deferential to the natural landscape, context, and local craft.

As the world continues to grapple with new lifestyles and spatial connections sifted by the coronavirus pandemic, Kuma’s philosophical and aesthetic concepts sheds light on what it means to prioritize adaptability and familiarity. As we continue processing the new meanings of architecture in a pandemic world, JAPAN Forward asked Kuma about what the future outlook may reveal and what we can be on the lookout for.

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