Kengo Kuma’s concept of “MAKERU Architecture” is not simply an architecture of humility or retreat. In this exhibition, yielding is not a gesture of weakness, but a rigorous ontological stance: a method that amplifies existing forces — humidity, climate, noise, cultural memory, material irregularity — rather than erasing or dominating them. Yielding becomes a world-making strategy. 

This exhibition focuses on contexts long embedded within Asian landscapes: the bodily, rhythmic behavior of architecture, and the sustained co-evolution between environment and built form. Unlike Western architectural strength, which often seeks to dominate and control, Asian architecture has historically invented modes of building as ecological interventions — architectures that activate, intensify, and ultimately beautify their environments. 

In Kuma’s work, matter is allowed to remain granular and plural — porous, rhythmic, layered, temporal — so that inside and outside are not separated by walls, but become an interactive field of resonance. Many of Kuma’s representative works are composed through subtle, embodied strategies such as particles, layering, porosity, weaving, and time. The materials themselves are often noisy, rough, and complex — far from uniform or homogeneous. Yet rather than eliminating this noise, Kuma embraces it, re-weaving its granular qualities into rhythm. Through this process, interactive spaces emerge in which interior and exterior are no longer severed by rigid boundaries.

Situated in Singapore as an Asian hub, this exhibition returns this methodology of reading complex Asian conditions back to the visitor through material and concreteness, not abstraction. The exhibition includes inhabitable tea rooms, full-scale mockups, and participatory interactions. It is designed to operate directly on the senses and emotions, enabling visitors to physically experience how architecture reorganizes the relationship between body and world through structural resonance.

“MAKERU Architecture” is no longer presented as architecture that submits passively to the world. Instead, it is an architecture that amplifies the world’s forces, fragments and granularizes itself, and strengthens the environment in order to reveal latent forms of beauty. “MAKERU Architecture” here does not defeat the world; it collaborates with the world, and makes the world more alive.