Kengo-Kuma

Capella Kyoto, opened in spring 2026 by Kengo Kuma & Associates on the site of a former elementary school in Miyagawa-cho, is the most fully realised expression yet of Kuma’s argument that a hotel can be made by applying machiya wisdom — smallness, layered roofs, inner courtyards — at 89 rooms. It is the Capella brand’s Japan debut, the third Kuma-designed structure clustered in this corner of Higashiyama, and a building that asks to be read against the grain of contemporary Japanese architecture — against Tadao Ando’s concrete monasticism, SANAA’s diagrammatic lightness, and Junya Ishigami’s atmospheric near-absence — as an argument for craft, depth, and the slow accretion of small material decisions. ...

Three statements anchor Japanese design at Milan Design Week 2026: Junya Ishigami’s Vitra pavilion — 280 square metres held up by 47 hair-thin steel columns at Weil am Rhein — Theaster Gates’s Chawan Cabinet at Prada Home, Via Montenapoleone 6, and Toshiko Mori becoming, this April, the first woman to take the AIA Gold Medal for Architecture in the Institute’s 119-year history. Around those three poles, a denser map: Koyori’s Salone debut, Karimoku’s “A Thoughtful Stay,” Hosoo’s “Wave Weave” with Carsten Nicolai, Kengo Kuma’s rugs at the Crespi Bonsai Museum, Noritake at Alcova’s Baggio Military Hospital, We+ casting aluminium from foundry burrs at Galleria Rubin, Roberto Sironi salvaging kominka beams with Sansui at Rossana Orlandi, and Hideo’s plant-derived bioresin tubs in Pavilion 10. This is the lineage; this is the map. ...