Kengo Kuma, Sou Fujimoto, and SANAA: Japanese architecture in 2026

Japanese architecture in 2026 doesn't design buildings. It designs experiences of time.

There's a moment in certain Hirokazu Kore-eda films where nothing happens. A corridor. A window. The light changing. And you, as a viewer, feel something shift, not in the plot, but inside you, in the way you occupy your seat in the cinema. That's Japanese cinema at its best: it doesn't narrate, it arranges. It places the body in a space and waits.

Contemporary Japanese architecture does exactly the same thing.

Japanese architecture: the set before the film

When Sou Fujimoto designed the Grand Ring for Expo 2025 in Osaka, the circular wooden structure certified as the largest timber architecture in the world, he didn't build a building. He built a threshold. An enormous frame to pass through, not a container to stand inside. The Ring isn't designed to be seen. It's designed to be traversed, to change the perception of what comes after.

It's a set. But the film isn't written yet. It's written by the bodies of the people who pass through it.

This is the logic of contemporary Japanese architecture, and it needs to be understood before it can really be appreciated. It's not minimalist aesthetics in the European sense, that slightly austere, almost moralistic cleanliness we've learned to associate with northern Europe or a certain Italian design tradition. It's something more radical: the conviction that space must do something to the body, not simply contain it.

LINK: https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/expo-map-index/main-facilities/grandring/ 

Kuma: erasing to reveal

Kengo Kuma calls his philosophy "erasing architecture." The phrase can sound like a provocation, but it's precise. Kuma doesn't want his buildings to disappear. He wants them to step back, to yield the spotlight to landscape and material. Wood, bamboo, stone, fabric: each project chooses the material that best responds to that specific place, that light, that climate.

The result is an architecture that works like Daido Moriyama's black and white photography: it doesn't simplify, it filters. It removes color to reveal structure. It removes decoration to let you feel the weight.

At MoN Takanawa, opened in 2026 in Tokyo, wood and vegetation rise in a spiral connecting earth and sky, creating a three-dimensional corridor where flowers change with the seasons: a building that transforms over time, like a film character aging on screen.

For an Italian audience used to reading architecture as form, the dome, the facade, the colonnade, this is a necessary disorientation. Kuma proposes an architecture read as duration, not as object. LINK: https://montakanawa.jp/en/ 

Fujimoto: inside and outside don't exist

Sou Fujimoto pushes further still. His approach blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior space, creating layered and adaptable environments. House N, one of his most studied works, is a series of boxes containing one another, without ever clearly defining where inside ends and outside begins.

It's an architecture that feels like Antonioni: that sensation in the Ferrara director's films where characters always seem to be in the wrong frame, never entirely inside or outside the scene.

In Fukuoka, the Gateway Park designed by Fujimoto proposes a network of suspended walkways, terraces, and hanging gardens that transform the landscape in front of Hakata Station. It's not a park in the traditional sense. It's an artificial topography, a landscape that is also infrastructure, that is also theater.

Those who walk through it never quite know what level they're on, whether they're crossing a building or an open space. The ambiguity is the project.

LINK: https://en.fukuoka-leapup.jp/biz/202309.14738

SANAA: transparency as grammar

If Kuma filters and Fujimoto dissolves, SANAA, the duo formed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, makes things transparent. Their buildings are made of glass and extremely thin steel, but not to display the structure: to make it almost invisible. SANAA's approach has influenced a generation of younger architects who prioritize experiential flow over formal gesture.

At Expo Osaka, their Better Co-being pavilion was an almost transparent structure with no walls, floor, or ceiling: the lines of a steel grid suspended between trees and sky. A building that doesn't oppose nature. It frames it. Like a director who chooses not to move the camera, letting the landscape enter the frame on its own.

This is the visual grammar that Japanese auteur cinema has known since Ozu, and that SANAA's architecture translates into built space: reticence as a form of attention, emptiness as presence. LINK: https://co-being.jp/en/architecture/ 

The film nobody is watching

The point isn't that these architects are conscious cinephiles. The point is that they emerge from the same visual culture, the same long education in ma, the Japanese concept of active emptiness, of meaningful pause, of the space between things that matters as much as the things themselves.

Italy has its own tools for understanding this: Antonioni knew what ma was, even without knowing the word. Bernardo Bertolucci knew it. And the Italian audience that grew its gaze on that cinema, that learned to sit in the silence of a wide shot, to wait for meaning to arrive, already has everything it needs to read these spaces.

What's missing isn't the sensibility. It's knowing where to look.

Japanese architects are building extraordinary sets. The film is running, and it's called everyday experience, body in space, seasons changing across a wooden facade.

You don't need to buy a ticket. You just need to stop looking for the plot and start feeling the frame.