Some visitors look at land. A rare few listen to it. When the celebrated Japanese architect Kengo Kuma walked the grounds of ONE Carmel with Founder Crystal Jiang and the artist Qionger Jiang, he did something in between, he stopped, again and again, and simply took it in, the meadows rising toward the Santa Lucia range, the fog moving through the oaks, the long light of the afternoon, the place where the mountains and the sea come together.
Figure 1: Japanese architect Kengo Kuma with ONE Carmel founder Crystal Jiang and artist Qionger Jiang at ONE Carmel, Source: ONE Carmel
For Kuma-san, the landscape carried an echo of home. He was born in Yokohama, where the hills fall toward the water much as they do here, and as he walked he reflected on that resemblance, on being reminded on this stretch of California coast of where he was born and where he has come from. It is a fitting recognition. Carmel has always been a place that reminds people of somewhere essential, a century of painters and poets came here for exactly that feeling.
But the heart of the visit was quieter still: the private conversations between Kuma-san and ONE Carmel Founder Crystal Jiang as they walked. Crystal shared something she had carried for a decade. Ten years ago, when this project first began, not yet a fully formed idea, just the very beginning of one, Kuma-san was the first architect she dreamed of to be part of it. In her mind, somehow, he was the perfect fit for Carmel.
Figure 2: Kuma-san and Crystal Jiang strolling through ONE Carmel, Source: ONE Carmel
And on his side, Kuma-san said he saw something very special here, unlike anything he has seen elsewhere in the world. For him, the most important part is striking the balance between nature and art in the homes that make up the built environment of the place. Balance, symmetry, honoring the land, while bringing arts and culture and homes into it at the same time: that, he said, is absolutely the challenge at hand, and one he looks forward to understanding better, developing the right design for the right place at the right time.
Figure 3: Kuma-san and Crystal Jiang discussing the planning of ONE Carmel, Source: ONE Carmel
Few architects are better suited to hear what this land has to say. Kuma-san's work — from the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo to the V&A Dundee in Scotland, from the Portland Japanese Garden to a wooden bridge museum folded into the mountains of Yusuhara, is unique in its exploration of the organic relationship between nature and design. Where much of modern architecture asserts itself against its surroundings, Kuma-san's buildings seem to grow from them: timber, stone, and light assembled so gently that the boundary between structure and landscape begins to dissolve. He has spent a career, in his own famous phrase, seeking to 'lose' architecture in its environment rather than impose it.
Figure 4: Kuma-san at lot 22 of ONE Carmel, Source: ONE Carmel
Figure 5: Kuma-san at lot 9 of ONE Carmel, Source: ONE Carmel
That philosophy is close to the heart of everything ONE Carmel is building. The community's founding conviction is that architecture should rise from the land, not upon it, that the meadows, ridgelines, and oaks of these 891 acres, ninety percent of which remain preserved open space, are not a backdrop for design but a partner in it. To walk the grounds with an architect who has spent fifty years practicing exactly that conversation between the built and the natural was, for everyone present, a quiet confirmation of the path.
The walk ended as it began, unhurried, attentive, in dialogue with the place. Kuma-san meditated on the great natural beauty of the site; his hosts listened; the land, as it has for a century of artists before, did most of the talking.
It was a visit, and a beginning of a conversation, the kind ONE Carmel intends to keep having, with the artists, architects, and makers who understand that the rarest luxury is a place that knows what it is.
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