The Stone DNA: Genetics of Design section of the PNA International Forum includes, alongside Peter Eisenman and Kinue Horikawa for the Angelo Mangiarotti Foundation, the testimony of Suguru Watanabe, an architect at Kengo Kuma & Associates since 2005.
At the renowned Japanese firm, Watanabe is involved not only in architectural projects (of any scale and anywhere in the world), but also in the design of furniture, graphics, videos, and products. The most significant project he has worked on—and the one he will explore in depth during his video presentation—is the Kadokawa Culture Museum in Tokorozawa: a dizzying library with towering canyon-like shelves that house fifty thousand books, enclosed by twenty thousand slabs of black and white granite, each 70 mm thick. The rough finish and misaligned joints give the stone a highly expressive character—in the studio’s own words, “giving the impression that each stone has emerged independently from the Earth’s crust.”
Watanabe will explain the design choices made by Kengo Kuma & Associates in his presentation titled KADOKAWA MUSEUM_STONE LIBRARY, which will be screened at 3:00 p.m. on June 12 in the Aula Magna Tolentini at IUAV Venice, aiming to offer an additional response to the forum’s slogan-question: Stone is…
