by Alanna Stang and Christopher Hawthorne

Fifty-one-year-old Kengo Kuma, among the best-known Japanese architects of his generation, tends to use each of his residential commissions to explore a single building material. In a dense Tokyo neighborhood, for example, he designed the so-called Plastic House.

In his design for a villa in a 2002 development north of Beijing called the Commune by the Great Wall, Kuma displayed the same knack for wringing beautiful forms from commonplace materials, building a house that is as much an ode to bamboo as a house constructed from it.

Bamboo is a highly sustainable material for architects and builders because it grows so quickly that its stocks can be replenished very efficiently. Commonly mistaken for a type of tree, bamboo is actually a grass, which helps explain the rate at which it shoots upward — several feet (about a meter) per day among some varieties.

The Commune by the Great Wall, planned by the ambitious Chinese husband-and-wife developers Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, features 11 private villas and a clubhouse, each designed by a leading Asian architect. The development is located in the shadow of the Great Wall, about an hour's drive north of Beijing.   >>>

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The Bamboo House by architect Kengo Kuma, at the Commune by the Great Wall, near Beijing, China. Photo: Satoshi Asakawa The tall windows of the living room provide views to the lush hillside. Photo: Satoshi Asakawa   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.