Kuma, who in 2016 was awarded with the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, considers his architecture as “some kind of frame of nature”. “You could say that my aim is ‘to recover the place’. The place is a result of nature and time; this is the most important aspect.”, he explained in Botond Bognar’s Material Immaterial: The New Work of Kengo Kuma. “With it, we can experience nature more deeply and more intimately. Transparency is a characteristic of Japanese architecture; I try to use light and natural materials to get a new kind of transparency.”