Kengo Kuma Exhibition: Two Carps: Water/Land – Village/Urban – phenomenology

Two Carps: Water/Land – Village/Urban – phenomenology

The carp, a symbol of new life in Japanese tradition, is used as a figurative act, symbolizing the close link between new architectural design and tradition. The definition of “rigid architecture/organic nature” is overturned by abstracting, with the schematization of the two fish, an allegory that approaches the ephemerality of stage design, but still returns sensations related to architectural spatiality. A play of volumes, made almost imaginary by the ethereal insubstantiality of the materials and amplified by the light fades, which partially engulf a long continuous platform.

Constructed with a metal structure surmounted by a walkable double pane of glass, the walkway protects and displays a series of backlit images that tell the story of the Japanese architect's work.
A highly scenographic effect defines a path for reading Kuma's various works, proposed to the visitors in a clear-cut sequence. A kind of luminous path that during the crowded opening "lined up" all those present, generating an unexpected orderly procession.
In the sinuous recesses created by the "eight" shaped track-circuit, the historic presences of the Salon, including the wooden horse from 1466, coexist well with the architectural structures of the exhibition that proposed, in full scale, two works by Kuma: the Oribe Tea House and the Paper Tea House.
It turns out to be intriguing the interaction generated between the obligatory path - punctuated by the reading of the photographic material - and the freedom offered by the figurative suggestions down the light walkway, with the vision of the aerial structures and floor-level interventions.
An unprecedented spatiality that, starting from the designer's assumption "I want to erase the architecture," seeks, in the abstract dialogue with the context, the spatial reason for its being and finds, in the appropriate use of the luminous suggestions (put in place with the valuable collaboration of Carlotta de Bevilacqua), its perceptive dematerialization.