A sequence of wing-like timber roofs will carry Kengo Kuma’s cultural centre for Verbier, with an 800-seat concert hall, a 120-seat auditorium, a gallery, children’s spaces, and a cafe gathered beneath them for a 2031 opening. That is according to designs released this week by Kengo Kuma & Associates, with the privately funded project shown publicly at December’s end and now run by a foundation chaired by Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the Nestlé chairman emeritus.
The price has climbed since the project’s first public showing, with Brabeck-Letmathe putting the figure at CHF 100 million beside Kuma at the Verbier Festival on 18 July, up from the 90 million cited at the December reveal and resting on private money alone.
Municipal land at Chemin des Marais Verts is the site, with planning and zoning to be cleared first, and construction provisionally set for 2028 to 2029, before the building opens in the summer of 2031 and an inaugural concert on New Year’s Eve that year.
Competing with the peaks was never the plan, with the roofline held deliberately low and the winged forms drawn from the chalet tradition that gives Val de Bagnes an architecture built almost wholly of wood. An agora anchors the centre of the plan as an informal gathering place, conceived to keep the building alive through the day rather than only at curtain time.
The invitation came from the Verbier Festival itself, with Kuma first showing the project at its 2025 talks and returning beside Brabeck-Letmathe on 18 July, while an interview in the Swiss daily 24 heures days later added a hotel to the plan, with wood as its principal material.
For now, the structural specification, the engineering team, and the species mix are unreleased; details will be provided once the Valais planning path clears, ahead of the provisional 2028 start.
It comes as Kuma headlined the International Mass Timber Conference in Portland this year, his first appearance at the world’s largest mass timber event, in a career that put more than 20,000 cubic metres of timber from all 47 of Japan’s prefectures into the Tokyo National Stadium.
“Buildings that breathe” is how Kuma has long described his approach, a phrase the Portland conference programme carried into his keynote billing, with light, wood, stone, and water treated as elements that bring built and natural environments into harmony.
