Street of one dream: visiting Kengo Kuma's Suteki House

Suteki House (Justin Krug Photography)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

When the new Cultural Crossing complex of buildings at the Portland Japanese Garden was unveiled this spring, it not only transformed a beloved destinations, but also gave the city something it otherwise lacks: a design by one of the world's great architects.

Though perhaps not quite as much of a worldwide household name as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster or Rem Koolhaas, Kengo Kuma is gaining on them quickly, both as a result of new projects like the New National Stadium in Tokyo, host site for the 2020 Olympics, but also through a long evolution that has seen Kuma refine his craft over time through a series of museums, commercial buildings and, occasionally, houses.

It was 10 years ago this fall that I happened to visit my first Kuma project, the Bamboo House near the Great Wall of China: part of a group of luxury homes by world-renowned architects and easily the star of the bunch: fusing the transparency of glass with the beautiful materiality and patterning capabilities of bamboo. That house was all about light and shadow, like so much of Kuma's work.

If you'd have told me that Portland would someday represent the architect's foray into the United States, I'd have been surprised. Ours is not a city that employs many out-of-town architects, especially not those in line for the Pritzker Prize, world architecture's Nobel.

Kengo Kuma at Suteki House (Brian Libby)

Yet yesterday, of all places at the Street of Dreams — the annual suburban subdivision opening that attracts tens of thousands with its tricked-out luxury builder homes, teeming with space and gadgets but skimping on authentic architectural style—there was one of Kuma's few houses in the United States.

It was like coming across a Ferrari or a Rolls Royce in a parking lot full of Ford and Chevy's biggest SUVs.

Suteki House deck, entrance and bedrooms (Justin Krug Photography)

Why the Street of Dreams? The company behind the project, Tokyo-based Suteki and parent company Nice Corporation, longtime importers of Oregon timber to Japan, are starting a new homebuilding venture in America, and this Kuma-designed house is the kickoff. And the company's CEO, Junichiro Hirata, is reportedly a fan of the Street of Dreams. I can understand that, because in Japan space is at a premium like few places in the world. Viewing these homes with bedroom after bedroom, home theaters, gargantuan great rooms and sentimental neb-historic style: it must come across like a fantasy world.

To his credit, Hirata and his company hired Kuma not to design another tricked out behemoth in a Disneyland style, but instead to show the thousands of Street of Dreams attendees that the best homes, like all architecture, are greater than the sum of their parts. They may or may not have exercise rooms and ninth bedrooms, but whatever collection of spaces there are, they flow into one another. They're sustainably built and teeming with natural light. They combine indoor and outdoor spaces to create an oasis. In other words, they do what the Suteki House does.

The L-shaped house, its design process led by Balazs Bognar for Kengo Kuma & Associates, is situated on a triangular lot with one big advantage: a creek running along the long side of the triangle with mature foliage and trees. Once you walk inside, every space faces the creek through walls of glass, be it the double-height kitchen and dining area to the left, or bedrooms to the right. The landscape design was performed by Sadafumi Uchiyama, curator of the Japanese Garden, and emphasizes the indoor-outdoor nature of the house: something very Japanese, but also very Pacific Northwest.

Great room and bedroom area at Suteki House (Justin Krug Photography)

The house also includes large overhangs and a generously sized deck cantilevering over the slope down to the creek. Walking the house with Kuma, he talked about being inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's legendary Fallingwater house, which also cantilevers over Bull Run, a tributary of the Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania. Kuma cited Wright's coming to Japan in the 1920s for the Imperial Hotel project, and the ensuing influence on Japanese architects.

But in turn the house is also very Japanese, not only in its razor-sharp precision but in its interplay of light and shadow. Moving in either direction from the center, hallways face the glass so nothing prevents the light from penetrating as deep as possible. Yet along the bedroom hallway, portions of the exterior and even underneath a skylight, the architect takes advantage of wood lovers to filter the light and create a kinetic sense of shadows changing throughout the day.

The shadows also demonstrate a larger idea about the house: its wonderfully subtle yet very highly detailed geometry. To a large degree, this is an L-shaped glass box. But along with the vertical louvers inside and out adding shadows, the pitched roof plane has the gentlest of slopes, which the architect highlights inside with recessed pockets of electric lighting along the lines of the triangular sloping ceiling. And wherever there is a horizontal plane, be it the roofline or the deck or even the kitchen countertops, it couldn't be thinner and sharper. I don't want to trot out Japanese cultural cliche here, but it's easy to tell an architect like Kuma comes from a country that values precision knife skills enough to raise carving fish to the highest of artforms.

Although the house is teeming like glass, so much so that it recalls the midcentury Case Study Houses in Los Angeles or Phillip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut, one gets an equal sense of its materiality, namely wood, in the form of both Japanese and Alaskan cedar as well as white oak. It's a reminder of why Japan and the Pacific Northwest make such good partners for architectural exchange. We are both largely rainy, temperate climates (this week's horrific heat wave not withstanding) full of forests and a long tradition of building with wood.

Indoor/outdoor at Suteki House (Justin Krug Photography)

I'll be curious to see what Street of Dreams visitors think of the house. By comparison to the other homes, it's lacking in terms of amenities and overall spaciousness. Will people who are fans enough of past Street of Dreams homes to drive to Happy Valley this year buy into the idea that a sustainable house that's very spacious by Japanese standards but relatively modest in scale by upper-class American suburban homes is worth trading in some of the square footage and gingerbread-house style? I suspect they're different demographics.

Even so, it's a good dialogue to have. In an Oregonian story about the house unveiling, reporter Janet Eastman described the client's intent being to attract suburban buyers and not just "fawning design writers." Indeed, I have no problem admitting that I fawn over Kuma and Japanese architecture in general, or confessing that I cringe looking at the biggest McMansions. But Janet is right: the house will be much more than a nice house, even a Kengo Kuma-designed house, if it can win hearts and minds to the notion of reigning in size and doubling down on architecture and construction quality is worth reconsidering.

Kuma-san (Brian Libby)

As it happens, this isn't a one-off for Kuma. While it's no surprise that Suteki plans to build more homes in Oregon, I wasn't necessarily expecting yesterday's ending announcement: that Kuma will be designing another home for next year's Street of Dreams, in Hillsboro. Because of the large tech presence in Washington County more so than Happy Valley in Clackamas County, I can more easily imagine a feeding frenzy of interest from the local community.

But then again, that creekside setting was pretty nice. Yesterday's unveiling took place in 100-degree heat. In what seemed like an act of unconscionable insanity at the time, the organizers eschewed the home's air conditioning and instead slid open the glass doors of the creekside-facing facade. (Like Wright's Fallingwater, doing so made whole corners disappear.) Yet admittedly there was more of a cooling breeze coming from beside the creek than I ever felt in any other part of the subdivision. And it's pretty amazing to see those glass walls just disappear.