This book is the first complete monographic summary of the career and work of a figure who is somewhat of a recluse but of undoubted interest in the contemporary Japanese architecture scenario, a figure who is still little known outside his own country: Katsufumi Kubota. The publication, with texts in Italian and English, starts with an introduction by Francesco Dal Co, an article penned by Kubota himself and a critical note by curator Marco Biagi.
Three of the last five Pritzker Architectures prizes have been awarded to four Japanese designers. This shows just how much the Land of the Rising Sun continues to be one of the foremost areas of cutting-edge research today in the sphere of global architecture. Katsufumi Kubota, born in 1957, is an architect who was born and still lives in Yamaguchi, a small city of 200,000 inhabitants in the south of Japan. In his 25 year long career, he has completed a fairly small number of projects, but all of them have a distinctive esthetic and spatial quality. More than anything, he has specialized in private residences, domestic homes of modest size, used by their creator to develop and perfect his minimalist style over time to express supreme elegance and intensity. Now he is ready to take on more complex challenges on a larger scale. The sequence of houses, in chronological order, includes buildings which have yet to be seen in the West, showing the consistent and gradual maturity of a personal style based on geometrical abstract shapes and the sublimation of high-quality materials. From his first elementary box-like reflecting prisms he has moved on in the last phase to using flexible shapes and a vague restraint in his buildings which astonish on account of their slender, refined physique: immaculate, fragile, light buildings, constructed to reveal or conjure up Nature, which, like origami, seem to have been created by making a few simple folds in a sheet of paper.