Sketching, drawing, modelling: phenomenology of the project in the work of Kengo Kuma

The book is a monograph on the work of the Japanise architect Kengo Kuma, that offers a reading of his practice of design which emphasizes the value of freehand drawing as part of the creative process. The papers tries to find an interpretation of the work of Kuma through his drawings, underlining the correspondence between design and drawing. The architecture of Kuma is asymmetrical, multisensory, anti-objectual and anti-objective, anti-perspective and anti-static, far removed from the Western categories that rely on the relationship between subject and object and on the perspective of the Renaissance. Kuma’s drawings are anti-perspective and almost always projected orthogonally. And it is no coincidence that also the rare perspective sketches almost exclusively refer to buildings to be built in the West, or are very similar in layout to ukiyo-e prints. The drawings, in fact, seem to have been conceived and realised in overlapping layers, two-dimensional but with great depth, suggesting in a few strokes the infinite richness of emotional experience that this architecture has to offer those who visit it, revealing itself in its textures, in its weaves, in its materials and in the light of its spaces.