If You Like the Architect Kengo Kuma, Don't Miss His Exhibition on 10 Building Materials

Bamboo, wood, paper, stone, metal, brick and tile, glass, resin, membrane/fiber, earth.

Kengo Kuma: a LAB for materials opens on September 4 at the Hongqiao International Exhibition Center in Shanghai. Taking the use of materials as its thread, the show looks back over 30 years of work by the Japanese master architect Kengo Kuma. The works are sorted into 10 categories of physical material: bamboo, wood, paper, stone, metal, brick and tile, glass, resin, membrane/fiber, and earth.

Sixty-one works are on show, through images and text, materials, models, samples, and art installations.

Kengo Kuma was born in 1954. One of Japan's best-known architects, he founded Kengo Kuma & Associates (KKAA) in 1990 and is now a professor in the architecture department at the University of Tokyo.

Kuma's work now stands in more than 20 countries. His studio's website lists 25 projects in China. The Chinese works in this exhibition are Great (Bamboo) Wall at Commune by the Great Wall (Beijing, bamboo), Forest House (Shanghai, wood), Dao (Taiwan, wood), Paper Brick (Shanghai, paper), the Yangcheng Lake Tourist Distribution Center (Suzhou, metal), Beijing Qianmen (Beijing, metal), Wuxi Vanke (Wuxi, metal), Hongkou SOHO (Shanghai, metal), the Xinjin Zhi Museum (Chengdu, brick and tile), Shipyard 1862 (Shanghai, brick and tile), the China Academy of Art Folk Art Museum (Hangzhou, brick and tile), Beijing Teahouse (Beijing, resin), Air Brick (Shanghai, membrane/fiber), and the Shang Xia Shanghai Flagship Store (Shanghai, membrane/fiber).

"Preserving the existing culture and nature" is the idea running through all of Kuma's work; he sets out to make buildings with warmth, buildings built around people. He and his team concentrate on researching new materials that can replace concrete and steel, and through them new architectural forms for the post-industrial age.

The Hongqiao International Exhibition Center, where the show is held, is itself a Kuma work. Xindi Group came to him hoping he would design this 310,000-square-meter trade and exhibition complex, and hoping it could stand in an organic relationship with Hongqiao's transport hub and its international convention and exhibition center. Kuma designed the project as a universe; he wanted architecture to express the cosmos. "This site in Hongqiao has buildings, but it also has nature and running water, and he believed that in such a setting the whole universe could be expressed."

The complex has four buildings. The exhibition sits inside one of them; another is not yet finished, and one is a café and souvenir shop. The exterior walls are glass and wood, and a small stand of bamboo grows outside the café. The exhibition hall has two floors, showing models, architectural photographs, material samples, and design concepts for all 61 works. Between the floors is a wide flight of steps where visitors can sit here and there; it doubles as a screening space.

Natural Architecture

Kuma sees the 20th century as the age of concrete: concrete built the century's cities, nations, and cultures. The theme of the 20th century was globalization and internationalization, and in architecture and city-making it was concrete that made globalization possible.

Concrete is not fussy about where it goes, it can be cast into any shape, and it is very strong. Those qualities carried this all-purpose material everywhere in the 20th century. But they also made the technology, and the single philosophy hidden behind it, uniform, so that it lost the variety of nature and the variety of architecture.

The 20th century, Kuma believes, was exactly that kind of uniform age. What held up its economy was people's strong wish to "own property." As ties of place and blood broke down, people grew unsettled, and they pinned their hopes on something as hard as concrete to make themselves steady again — dissolving, or trying to dissolve, every insecurity about their own existence.

In his book Natural Architecture《自然的建筑》, Kuma writes that the most frightening thing about concrete is that you cannot see it change inside; that is its very nature. People's senses go numb, and fitting out interiors inside concrete becomes ordinary life.

The line between the natural and the man-made, Kuma believes, is in fact blurred. When a thing forms a happy connection with the place it stands in, we feel it is natural. Nature is a kind of relatedness. As the book puts it: only when we stop asking how something looks and start asking how to make it can we understand what happiness is. A building must be produced out of that land, that place, as its raw material, by methods that suit the place.

Testing that method against one specific place after another is what Natural Architecture sets out to examine — and what Kengo Kuma: a LAB for materials sets out to show.

Kuma said: "With this exhibition I hope to show every material I have used. The research method differs from one material to the next, but I hope people will sense something that runs past the differences between them — my shared way of approaching architecture, something like a philosophy."

10 Materials and Their Signature Buildings

"We are not trying to leave behind a single work, but to keep a moving whole — the laboratory. That way, even after I am no longer in this world, these relationships can continue."

• Bamboo

Behind Kuma's childhood home in Yokohama stood a large bamboo grove. Bamboo grows naturally straight, in a way no other tree can match, and its geometric beauty draws architects. Across the whole 20th century, though, bamboo was never used at scale as a primary building material, because it cracks once dry and is hard to use structurally. Kuma and his studio have kept pushing at that limit.

Great (Bamboo) Wall, Commune by the Great Wall, Beijing, China

To build the bamboo structure, the nodes were removed, steel bar was inserted and concrete poured in, producing CFB (concrete-filled bamboo) tubes.

Heart to Heart《以心传心》, Gwangju, South Korea

Working from the flexibility of bamboo, Kuma built a bamboo shelter that sways, one that answers movement interactively. Step onto a bamboo board and the floor carries the force to both ends of the bamboo, amplifying the motion at the tips and setting the whole space vibrating.

Hamada Soy Sauce, Kumamoto, Japan

It uses guadua, a special South American bamboo that does not crack even after drying. The hardest part of building with bamboo is the joints; here bolts hold them tightly together, and the "yatara" random weaving used for bamboo baskets and similar objects is applied.

• Wood

Kuma was born and raised in a single-story wooden house built in Yokohama in the 1930s, which gave his childhood a warm, comfortable place to grow up in. Wood is the easiest material to fit together: machine a mortise and a tenon and the pieces simply join. It is tough and easy to shape. A building can be imagined as a cloud, assembled from loose particles. Kuma believes wood can build futuristic, cloud-like architecture.

Coeda House, Shizuoka, Japan

Thin strips of Japanese hiba cypress are assembled into an open, permeable umbrella-shaped pavilion, like a great tree throwing out countless branches — a space so open it seems to merge with the Pacific.

Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center, Tokyo, Japan

The single-story wooden house — the "elementary particle" of Tokyo — is stacked up into an eight-story mid-rise. It is a variation on the standard 20th-century building system, in which floors with identical plans and sections are piled one on top of another. Each of the seven "houses" carries wooden shading louvers 300 millimeters deep; adjusting the tilt and angle of each floor's louvers makes every level read as a separate object and also cuts down the sunlight.

• Paper

What is interesting about paper is that it can exist as a liquid. Washi is called "frozen liquid," and in architecture, which is otherwise made entirely of solids, that liquid quality is precious. This is why Japan's building tradition takes the use of paper so seriously.

Archives Antoni Clavé, Paris, France

The project uses a washi-coating technique: washi pulp is spread over perforated aluminum panels, which then wrap the whole space. The technique allows the transparency of the metal panels to be adjusted, controlling the quality and the quantity of the sunlight that comes through the skylight.

• Stone

Heavy, hard blocks of stone are piled up into a solid wall, and through that wall people and their surroundings are joined. At the same time, the stones are stacked one by one by human hands. Laid carefully by hand, a stone wall is on one side as solid as stone, and on the other deeply human, bound closely to the hand that built it.

—Natural Architecture

V&A Dundee, Dundee, Scotland

Scotland's cliffs, which cut the sea off from the land, are rough and mottled. Drawing on them, the design builds a sheltering façade whose precast concrete elements are spaced at set intervals so that light reaches the interior. The aim of the museum was to give a man-made building the strength and coarseness of a natural cliff.

• Metal

It is metal, and yet it behaves like a living thing. Metal can strike a delicate balance between strong and weak, because it has not only strength but very high toughness. Kuma has tried fixing paper or earth onto metal mesh, pulling metal, paper, and earth into a single system.

Yangcheng Lake Tourist Distribution Center, Suzhou, China

Randomly arranged aluminum angles build the roof and reproduce the rough texture of thatch. The main goal of the design was an effect in which the randomly glinting aluminum roof merges with the beautiful surface of Yangcheng Lake.

• Brick and Tile

Like resin and glass, brick and tile turn from liquid to solid through heat. Fire is the center of the house: it gives people warmth and protects life, but it also acts on matter in many forms and drives it to change. The human body is itself a warm flow of liquid, which is why we feel such kinship with fire, and with liquid.

China Academy of Art Folk Art Museum, Hangzhou, China

The design started from a wish that visitors could feel that the land under the building was once a tea plantation, so continuous up-and-down ramps were built into its floors. A polygonal subdivision breaks the museum into a series of complicated sloping triangles, so that its small triangular roofs look like the houses of a village.

Tiles made by open-air firing cover the roof and the partition walls, keeping out direct sun.

The stainless-steel wires in this project cross on the diagonal, which makes the arrangement of the tiles more random.

• Glass

Glass is not only a transparent plane. It begins as grains of earth and is turned into liquid by the power of fire. What interests us is not just glass's transparency and emptiness but its character as a material. Glass has thickness above all, and that thickness appears suddenly at the edges.

Tiffany & Co. Ginza, Tokyo, Japan

Sandwiching the light, high-strength aluminum honeycomb core used to build aircraft fuselages between sheets of glass produced a sustainable façade unit. These wall units let a great deal of light through and are also good at blocking solar radiation.

• Resin

Grasp resin's free-flowing character firmly enough and it too can show a softness and warmth to match wood. As its name suggests, resin comes from plants, algae, and other matter that piled up on the seabed and became petroleum. It is because of that process that touching the surface of resin feels familiar.

Since resin is itself of plant origin and can be broken down completely back into soil, it can be counted a member of the earth's cycle of regeneration.

Water Branch House, New York, USA

Water-filled plastic containers used as temporary barriers on construction sites suggested an exterior wall system whose weight changes with the water inside it, first tried out with Lego-like plastic containers. By circulating warm or cold water through the walls, the floor, and the roof, the structure can work as an environmentally friendly device.

• Membrane/Fiber

If you want to make architecture softer, one of the most interesting and most promising materials is fiber.

Fiber, weak and soft by nature, has been tried as seismic reinforcement for heavy, rigid frame structures. Modern soft materials make up for what the heavy, hard materials of the 20th century lacked.

Memu Meadows, Hokkaido, Japan

This is an experimental house wrapped in polyester membrane: the membrane covers a wooden frame as the outer skin, with fiberglass applied inside as the inner skin, making a double-membrane structure. A heater set between the two membranes circulates hot air, which makes it possible to build a well-insulated house in a cold region.

• Earth

Japan has a great many volcanoes, so its soil is rich in the nutrients of volcanic ash; leave it alone and it will run thick with weeds.

Earth is not just a mass of particles. It is also a liquid, and more than that, a vessel that brings life into being.

An'yoji Temple Wooden Buddha Statue Storage Facility, Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi, Japan

The project revives the technique of building with adobe blocks. The soil produced locally is called "Toyoura earth," a high-quality soil with fairly even grain size, which helps make the storehouse and its enclosing walls solid.

Adobe blocks made from this soil insulate well, and they can also build a naturally ventilated building. The blocks that touch the ground have cement mixed in to keep them from collapsing in the rain. Where ventilation was needed, narrow gaps were left between the blocks and reinforced with steel plate.

Exhibition Information

Kengo Kuma's Materials Laboratory

Kengo Kuma: a LAB for materials

Dates: September 4 to November 30, 2018 (closed Mondays)

Hours: 10:00-18:00, last entry 17:00

Venue: Building 10-2, Hongqiao International Exhibition Center

Address: 2377 Shenkun Road, Minhang District, Shanghai

Public transport: Metro Line 2 or Line 10 to Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2

Shuttle pickup: P5 parking lot at Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2

Departures: 10:00-17:30, every half hour

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and all images in this article were photographed by QDaily.