TC Cuadernos 158: Kengo Kuma. Rural & neo-rural

This monograph is dedicated to the work of Kengo Kuma & associates from 1994 to the present.

It collects, in almost 300 pages, 26 projects, developed with drawings, photographs, texts and construction details and divided into the categories of Rural and Neo-rural.

With a prologue by Carlos Ferrater and an introductory text by Javier Villar and Kengo Kuma himself, in which the reason for this division is explained, which will give rise to a second volume, soon, which will collect the works in the Urban category, completing this compilation.

Kengo Kuma’s interest in the rural comes from the studio’s origins in the days before the economic crisis that devastated Japan in the 1990s, with commissions in remote rural areas and on a small scale outside the economic processes of the city.

This rural world is not considered by Kengo Kuma as an uncomfortable place to implement urban structures alien to this reality, but the rural is at the starting point of his projects integrating architecture in delicate contexts, maintaining and recovering artisan practices and materials considered as obsolete by contemporary architecture.

This search and use of available techniques and materials and their applications in a modern key, in collaboration with artisans, becomes the modus operandi that will mark his project strategy in his works in urban and rural areas, both in Japan and internationally.

Neo-rural projects do not respond to new project attitudes but to the change in attitude resulting from current discussions where the rural is at the base of the idea of a sustainable future within a necessary evolution, as opportunities to seek new and better realities within of a new paradigm that seeks the future outside our cities