Kurokawa When the plans to extend the Van Gogh Museum were in preparation, the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa was approached to design the exhibition wing. It was not an idle choice: Kurokawa has been an important international figure in the world of architecture for forty years. The work of Kurokawa (b. 1934) has undergone different styles and followed diverse principles. As a reaction to the rationalism of Modernism, in the 1970s he designed very advanced flexible buildings consisting of separate capsules. Later he thought primarily in terms of symbiosis, in which he combined the opposites Western/non-Western, public/private, and order/chaos. His work from the last ten years has been dominated by abstract, geometric forms. All of Kurokawa’s main principles can be found in the design for the wing of the Van Gogh Museum. Symbiosis plays a large role: setting/architecture, Rietveld building/extension, and Japanese/European culture. Kurokawa opted for asymmetry as a response to the Rietveld cube: the building is elliptical in form, and the box-shaped print room has been rotated in relation to the axis of the wing. [1/3] >