Kengo Kuma is one of Japan's most acclaimed modern architects. Curiously, however, he dislikes much of the country's modern architecture, including perhaps its most imperious and striking example - the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which looms over Shinjuku. 'Japanese architects have lost their courage,' he laments. 'It's a symbol of their loss of confidence in society and in the future.'
Meanwhile, China, where he is much in demand, is casting aside its unique architectural inheritance in the rush to modernise, says 56-year-old Kuma. He argues that Japan, which absorbed many of the ancient Middle Kingdom's design traditions, can help China recover the best of its past.
Having completed about 60 construction projects, the soft-spoken architect believes that profit should take a back seat to quality. Kuma is increasingly drawn to smaller, modest commissions that use natural materials that meld with - rather than impose themselves on - the environment. 'I don't want to express myself in nature, I want to listen to it,' he explains in his office in Tokyo's Aoyama district. 'The construction site gives a big hint about what to do, if you can hear it.'
Yet he is probably best known in China for the huge, upscale Sanlitun Soho development, which opened this year in his favourite city, Beijing. Despite its mammoth 466,000-square-metre scale, however, he says the finished product is faithful to his design obsessions - to soften hard urban lines and incorporate, rather than ignore, local contexts. An open development with no walls and the neighbourly feel of its New York namesake, one of the Sanlitun Soho's most striking features is what he calls the 'Grand Canyon effect' achieved by the water pathway that runs through the length of the complex.
Born in the port city of Yokohama, Kuma has two distinct eras to his career. During Japan's bubble economy, when inflated land and building prices encouraged architectural egos to run riot, he was a disciple of what he calls the architecture of fragmentation - his monumental, imposing buildings would intrude into the Tokyo landscape, and 'dissolve and blend into the chaos that surrounded them'.
But the collapse of the bubble after 1990 sparked a profound creative change. 'I got a chance to work outside of Tokyo, in small villages,' he recalls. There he began to explore how to ease his buildings into the local environment and harmonise them with local practices and culture, using the materials he found around him.
