Wood, unlike steel or concrete, carries a cultural expectation of warmth and naturalness that no designer can ignore — and precisely because of this it becomes a particularly rich ground for linguistic experimentation: three contemporary architects who have made it the protagonist of their own work have drawn three completely different design conclusions from that same expectation.
Kengo Kuma: the defeat of architecture as a program
Kengo Kuma has explicitly theorized, in writings and interviews, the concept of "architecture defeated": the building must not dominate the landscape with its own volumetric presence, but dissolve into it through a minute, repeated texture that breaks up its perception as a single mass. Wood, worked into thin slats arranged according to patterns derived from traditional Japanese carpentry (kigumi — dry joints without nails or glue, handed down through centuries of temple carpentry), becomes the privileged tool of this strategy: façades that look more like woven fabric than walls, shadows multiplied through dense screens, a perceptual scale that rejects monumentality even in buildings of significant public size. It is no coincidence that Kuma was chosen for the new Japan National Stadium in Tokyo (2019): a sports infrastructure of enormous scale, clad in wood slats sourced from all 47 Japanese prefectures, explicitly designed not to intimidate the city skyline the way an all-steel-and-glass structure would have.
Shigeru Ban: structure as a response to emergency
Since the 1990s, Shigeru Ban has developed an entire structural repertoire based on high-strength cardboard tubes (paper tube), often used in post-disaster reconstruction projects where affordability, speed of assembly and local availability of materials matter as much as structural performance in the strict sense. The cardboard tube, technically, is a spiral-wound cellulosic composite treated to resist moisture — not simple packaging cardboard — capable of structural performance sufficient for temporary shelters and even permanent medium-scale buildings, such as the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch (New Zealand, 2013), built as a provisional cathedral after the 2011 earthquake. Ban applies the same design rigor of "noble" structural timber to a poor, temporary material, showing that the language of exposed cellulosic fiber — joints, connections, surface texture — can communicate architectural dignity regardless of the building's cost or intended lifespan.
Peter Zumthor: wood as a sensory envelope
Zumthor, already encountered for his use of stone at the Therme Vals, develops an equally physical and sensory language of wood in the Saint Benedict chapel in Sumvitg (Switzerland, 1988): a small teardrop-plan chapel, clad externally in untreated larch wood shingles that, exposed to alpine weather, naturally grey over time into a silvery tone — an ageing process accepted, even sought, as part of the design, rather than fought with protective treatments. The interior, entirely in untreated spruce, creates an environment acoustically and visually different from the cold stone of Vals: warm, resonant, almost organic. The common thread with Kuma and Ban, despite the opposite formal outcome, is the refusal to treat wood as a neutral surface interchangeable with any other cladding — all three choose it precisely for what wood, and only wood, can do perceptually.