The Bamboo House by architect Kengo Kuma, at the Commune by the Great Wall, near Beijing, China. Photo: Satoshi Asakawa


The tall windows of the living room provide views to the lush hillside.Photo: Satoshi Asakawa

    Fifty-one-year-old Kengo Kuma, among the best-known Japanese architects of his generation, tends to use each of his residential commissions to explore a single building material. In a dense Tokyo neighborhood, for example, he designed the so-called Plastic House.

    In his design for a villa in a 2002 development north of Beijing called the Commune by the Great Wall, Kuma displayed the same knack for wringing beautiful forms from commonplace materials, building a house that is as much an ode to bamboo as a house constructed from it.

    Bamboo is a highly sustainable material for architects and builders because it grows so quickly that its stocks can be replenished very efficiently. Commonly mistaken for a type of tree, bamboo is actually a grass, which helps explain the rate at which it shoots upward ?several feet (about a meter) per day among some varieties.

    The Commune by the Great Wall, planned by the ambitious Chinese husband-and-wife developers Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, features 11 private villas and a clubhouse, each designed by a leading Asian architect. The development is located in the shadow of the Great Wall, about an hour's drive north of Beijing.


The Bamboo House by architect Kengo Kuma, at the Commune by the Great Wall, near Beijing, China.Photo: Satoshi Asakawa


An open-air tea house seems to float above a shallow reflecting pool.Photo: Satoshi Asakawa


Both kitchen and dining room have a bamboo-clad ceiling.Photo: Satoshi Asakawa


Bamboo House floor plans.Image: Kengo Kuma


Bamboo House sections.Image: Kengo Kuma

    Kuma's design for the Bamboo House borrows its low horizontal profile from the Great Wall itself. But while the wall symbolizes permanence, solidity, and exclusion, Kuma's bamboo wall is meant to suggest the easy transfer of light and breezes from one side of the house to the other, as well as a certain lightweight, unfinished, and even fragile quality. Of bamboo, Kuma says he finds "charm in the material's weakness."

    The heart of the plan is a delicate tea house that floats on a square pool just outside the living room and is surrounded by what Kuma calls a "scaffold" of bamboo that offers privacy as well as views of a mountainside that is dense and green even in winter.

    The house is also designed to mimic the way the Great Wall, as Kuma puts it, "runs almost endlessly along the undulating ridge line without being isolated from the surrounding environment." Kuma wanted to keep the house long and low rather than have it stand out as an object, with a single story at grade above a basement. That shape helps the house look smaller than it is.

    Kuma has done much to dramatize the design possibilities of bamboo, just as he did with plastic in the Tokyo house. Who knew, after all, that bamboo could be sculptural, or cast such a variety of shadows, or add rhythm to a facade so effectively?

    If Kuma thus inspires other architects to trade mahogany or some other endangered hardwood for this most environmentally friendly of materials ?especially in China, where there is rising demand for American-style residential excess and no green design movement to speak of ?his decision to accept the developers' invitation to take part in this early stab at Chinese luxury housing will be justified.

    Kuma has also shown how luxurious sustainability can appear when put in the right architectural hands. In the end, the house may wind up functioning as a kind of architectural Trojan horse, helping to sneak green-design ideas behind the lines drawn by zealous developers.