Designed in 1988 in the city of Shizuoka, the Comblé Bar encapsulates the very essence of his minimalist approach. Kuramata turns light into a building material and transparency into a raw substance. Tucked away on the first floor of an unassuming building, the space reveals itself as a suspended cube, almost unreal. From the moment one enters, light occupies the central role. Two large sheets of transparent plastic, delicately folded and backlit, form an arched ceiling that seems to float above the floor. Bold planes of primary colors – red, yellow, and blue – punctuate the composition and balance the light. Every line, every surface contributes to an impression of controlled movement.
Under the lighting design of Ingo Maurer, the Comblé Bar takes on the appearance of an immaterial stage, where transparency becomes theater. Kuramata does not seek to conceal structures but to dematerialize them – to make them as fine and weightless as a memory. The Comblé Bar thus becomes a perceptual experience: a place where the visitor’s body, immersed in light, loses its habitual bearings and dissolves into a continuum of reflections and color.
Among the emblematic pieces of the Comblé Bar, the Revolving Cabinet holds a special place. This column of red swivel drawers organized around a black axis expresses the same fascination with geometry and repetition. Through its verticality and serial order, the piece immediately evokes Donald Judd’s Stacks. In Judd’s work, each volume asserts itself in its raw materiality and its frontal relationship to space. As he wrote: “What is important about art is that the work exists on its own. It is autonomous. It is neither representation nor imitation.” Kuramata shared this idea of autonomy but expressed it through evaporation rather than presence.
This reflection on transparency finds an earlier echo in one of his prior projects: the Oblomov Restaurant, completed in 1981 in Fukuoka, as part of the Il Palazzo Hotel, alongside Gaetano Pesce, Ettore Sottsass, and Aldo Rossi. There, Kuramata was already exploring the relationship between structure and light in a more experimental, almost theatrical way. It was within this context that his first monumental floor lamps appeared – made of acrylic and aluminum – hybrid objects between furniture and architecture. One of these, originally from the restaurant, was later sold at Phillips for £43,180. Standing over five meters tall, the luminous column contains synthetic roses embedded in resin, as if suspended in time.
This delicate balance between transparency and structure echoes his most celebrated chairs, such as Miss Blanche and How High the Moon, where the apparent lightness of the material conceals meticulous engineering. More than thirty years after its opening, the Comblé Bar retains its pristine freshness. Its owner, Masahiko Nakayama, likes to remind visitors that the place “does not age,” as it seems to exist beyond time and fashion. This bar does not merely welcome visitors – it suspends them in stillness. With rare precision, Shiro Kuramata captured the spirit of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more,” but in his own way. The Comblé Bar remains one of the finest demonstrations of what a truly inhabited minimalism can be – at once structural and immaterial.
Transparency in Kuramata’s Work
At the end of the 1980s, as minimalism established itself as a universal language, Shiro Kuramata gave Japan a distinctly singular tone. Born as a reaction to abstract expressionism and pop art, minimalism advocates an economy of means, formal rigor, and the absence of symbolism. It seeks to reduce the work to its simplest expression, to eliminate all traces of subjectivity so that only the pure presence of the object in space remains. Shiro Kuramata’s work follows this lineage, yet his approach to minimalism is anything but dogmatic. Where Western artists such as Donald Judd or Dan Flavin assert the raw materiality of form, Kuramata seeks to reveal its opposite: transparency. His minimalism is luminous, almost intangible. He does not attempt to freeze matter but to make it permeable — to turn it into the medium of a sensory experience.
Among the emblematic pieces of the Comblé Bar, the Revolving Cabinet holds a special place. This column of red swivel drawers organized around a black axis expresses the same fascination with geometry and repetition. Through its verticality and serial order, the piece immediately evokes Donald Judd’s Stacks. In Judd’s work, each volume asserts itself in its raw materiality and its frontal relationship to space. As he wrote: “What is important about art is that the work exists on its own. It is autonomous. It is neither representation nor imitation.” Kuramata shared this idea of autonomy but expressed it through evaporation rather than presence.
This delicate balance between transparency and structure echoes his most celebrated chairs, such as Miss Blanche and How High the Moon, where the apparent lightness of the material conceals meticulous engineering. More than thirty years after its opening, the Comblé Bar retains its pristine freshness. Its owner, Masahiko Nakayama, likes to remind visitors that the place “does not age,” as it seems to exist beyond time and fashion. This bar does not merely welcome visitors – it suspends them in stillness. With rare precision, Shiro Kuramata captured the spirit of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more,” but in his own way. The Comblé Bar remains one of the finest demonstrations of what a truly inhabited minimalism can be – at once structural and immaterial.
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