In Kasugai in Japan, on the edge of Nagoya, Kengo Kuma & Associates scales up an old Japanese toy into GC Prostho Museum Research Center, a lattice of 60mm timber sticks locked together without a single nail or metal bracket.
The building begins with a toy. Cidori is a Japanese plaything of wooden sticks cut with notched joints that lock by a simple twist, no nails, no glue, no metal brackets. Pull one stick and the whole assembly falls open in the hand; twist it back and the lattice holds. The craft survives in Hida Takayama, a mountain town where joiners still cut the pieces by hand, and it is that logic, not a structural diagram, that Kengo Kuma & Associates chose to enlarge into a museum in Kasugai, on the edge of Nagoya.
The toy's element is a stick 12mm square. Here it grows to 60mm, cut in lengths of two and four meters and stacked into a cubic grid 50cm on a side. Jun Sato, the project's structural engineer, put the joint through compression and flexure tests to confirm what looks improbable: that a child's twisting toy could carry the loads of a real building. Nothing concealed reinforces it. The same interlocking sticks that make the walls make the roof, the floors between levels, and the vitrines inside.
That last move is the subtle one. The 50cm grid does double duty, cage and display case at once, so the collection sits inside the frame rather than on top of it. White molars rendered at furniture scale stand on the terrazzo floor, a nod to the dental-products company whose research the building houses and whose name, Prostho, borrows from prosthodontics. A dark bronze figure keeps watch from a cell high in the lattice. Behind it, translucent panels wash the timber in a soft, even light.
From the street the cage reads as a single battered cube, its top splayed outward like a basket, glowing amber at dusk through thousands of small openings. Inside, the grid dissolves depth into a blur of crossing lines that shift as you move around it. Kuma has called it a way of "creating a universe by combining small units like toys with your own hands," a case against the machine-made and for the building put together, stick by stick, by people.
