The long-awaited lifting of the ban on foreign tourists coincides with the launch of striking new works — and a new hotel — on Naoshima Island. Just in front of the Park building of Benesse House, the sleek and art-filled hotel-cum-museum at the heart of Japan’s Naoshima Art Site, I spot something new. A transparent…

Could the architecture of Kyoto’s historic machiya townhouses offer modern lessons in remote work? While the pandemic has turned many kitchens and bedrooms into makeshift home offices around the world, there’s one style of housing in Japan that’s been mixing business and living space for centuries. The city of Kyoto is known for its stock of unique historical structures…

To mark important milestones in Japan, women will often wear special clothes referred to as Haregi or ‘your Sunday’s best’. Marusho Kimono Shop is a long-established Kimono rental store in Yokohama, with a mission of handing down traditional Japanese culture through Haregi. People often wear Kimono’s for weddings, summer festivals funerals and for ceremonial occasions.The…

The highly anticipated House of Music in Hungary has opened its doors. The new, leading European cultural venue, designed by the renowned Japanese architecture studio of 2022 Wallpaper* Design Awards judge Sou Fujimoto, not only represents a striking new landmark for the country, but it also is the architect’s very first completed, permanent, new-build in the continent….

Jun Aoki has once again customized the luxury brand Louis Vuitton with another unique façade for Ginza Namiki Store. He has remade the façade of the building previously designed by him in 2007. The earlier design utilized painted aluminum sheets in a textural pattern that expressed both solidity and lightness. This remade façade is brilliant…

Kengo Kuma and associates (KKAA), the firm led by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, has designed a temporary pavilion for events and performances in Harumi, Tokyo.  The semi-outdoor space was built using a steel frame infilled with panels made from cross-laminated timber.  T These CLT panels measure 160 x 350 centimeters (63 x 138 inches) and…

  Charles Bernstein, A.I.A. This poetically designed church was completed in 1995 on a low budget, and won Ando the Pritzker Award. The relatively small structure is located in a suburb of Osaka. Like most of Ando’s work, the building materials consist of glass, steel and of course, poured-in-place concrete. In addition to evocatively placed…

New York Times article: Designer for a Postwar World by Amy Qin NAHA, Japan — He has been called the “emperor of Japanese architecture” by his peers and “visionary” by critics. Now, the internationally renowned architect Arata Isozaki can add yet another tribute: the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The announcement on Tuesday of architecture’s highest…

From ArchDaily by María Francisca González Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect and winner of the Pitzker Prize 2019, is not only renowned for his fruitful portfolio of works built all over the world (more than a hundred) but also for his continuous input to the theory of urbanism, including texts and proposals. It is precisely…

During an artist’s residency that I had in Venice in 2015, I went to see Sugimoto’s Glass Tea House Mondrian and took these photos. This temporary pavilion project at Le Stanze del Vetro, San Giorgio Maggiore… was one of the off site installations that were part of that year’s Venice Bienale. It was intriguing that…