Kengo
Kuma & Associates (J)
Kengo Kuma (1954)
Kengo Kuma (1954)
After
studying at Tokyo University, and spending a year doing research at Columbia
University (1985-86), Kengo Kuma set up his own agency in 1990. His work,
which might be described as radical, not to say negative, comes across above
all as a critique of academic and formal architecture, and of any manner
of indulgence with regard to both style and fashion. By taking an in-between
track--between east and west, invention and tradition, and presence and
deletion--, his architecture is intended not as object production but rather
as an upsurge of meaning. In his quest for a highly worked and sophisticated
relationship between nature and construct, yet without any harking back
to the past, Kengo Kuma updates many traditional techniques, in a way that
is more attuned to the environment and surroundings. For his Daibutsu project--an
exhibition pavilion for an ancient statue of the Buddha, he borrows the
local process of Hanchiku (a kind of adobe or rammed clay), and makes use
of its technical properties (humidity control, natural ventilation). For
his project involving a bath-house at Gizan Onsen, he resorts to an ancestral
technique of wooden open-work lattice-like partitions. As for the Great
(Bamboo) Wall, a housing scheme set in a small valley, he reverts to a basic
construction using bamboo culms and their poetics.