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Kengo Kuma’s Architecture of the Future
https://www.nytimes.com/2...itect.html
By Nikil Saval
Feb. 15, 2018 Rejecting flashy forms in favor of buildings in harmony with their environment, the architect — poised to become world famous for his stadium for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo — is trying to reinvent his entire trade. KENGO KUMA'S FASCINATION with architecture began when he was 10 years old and his father took him to visit Kenzo Tange's famous Yoyogi National Gymnasium, constructed for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Tange's arena — with its high mast and violently sloping roof, its form like a discus emerging obliquely from the earth — was a masterpiece of engineering, and remains the most breathtaking example of Japanese Modernism. Speaking to me about the building in October, in the glassed-in penthouse library above his firm's Tokyo offices, Kuma became animated. I had only met him a few minutes earlier, in the cramped main quarters, when he swiftly emerged from his tiny, cubicle-like space in the far corner. Kuma is tall, informal — he was wearing stonewashed jeans, and a striped T-shirt under a nylon jacket with frayed and shredded shoulders — and he greeted me with a quick handshake, as if I were another employee. But he grew noticeably excited speaking about Tange's gymnasium. "Tange treated natural light like a magician," he said, discussing the way the panels on the ceiling reflected light bouncing off the swimming pool. "From that day, I wanted to be an architect." And yet Tange's work — aggressively modern, wresting enormous form out of space, deploying the latest synthetic materials, an imposition on the landscape and an attention-grabbing demonstration of what architecture could do in a city that only 20 years earlier had been comprehensively destroyed by American bombs — could not be further from Kuma's own aesthetic. He is the most famous Japanese architect Americans have never heard of, mostly due to his sparse record of building outside of East Asia; he has only one public commission in the United States, a "cultural village" for the Japanese Garden in Portland, Ore., whose most notable structure is a small glass box of a teahouse cantilevered past a single post, making it appear to float above a ravine. Many of his notable works are in rural areas and serve an ostensibly minor purpose — say, to exhibit a collection of Hiroshige woodblock prints, or to sell Taiwanese pineapple cakes, or to house a Starbucks in the city of Fukuoka, known equally for its ancient temples and shopping malls.
Kuma's Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center in Tokyo, which is 128 feet tall and was built in 2012.CreditStefan Ruiz
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^ The exterior of the GC Prostho Museum and Research Center. The structure was made — like many of Kuma's buildings — for more or less humble purposes, in this case a museum dedicated to the history of dentistry.CreditStefan Ruiz | |
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All I can say is if I stay in the States, AZ is looking better and better. I don't see how people can stand all those boxes on top of each other, it would drive me mad. Time keeps on slipping into the future...
This moment is all there is... |
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AZ? boxes on top of each other? | |
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Kuma's design for the Fujiya ryokan — his take on the traditional Japanese inn — at Ginzan Onsen, a secluded hot spring town in Yamagata Prefecture, north of Tokyo.CreditCreditStefan Ruiz
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Time keeps on slipping into the future...
This moment is all there is... |
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I'm not following that with this topic?
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These buildings are not in the US they are in Japan | |
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Time keeps on slipping into the future...
This moment is all there is... |
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lol ok
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? can you explain the Arizona/USA reference?
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Time keeps on slipping into the future...
This moment is all there is... |
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oh ok. Yeah the ones I posted(1,2) are not living spaces and those are nice for what they are
the 1st is the Kuma's Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center the 2nd is the GC Prostho Museum and Research Center
the 3rd photo is a nice living space(Inn) [Edited 5/17/19 12:19pm] | |
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Time keeps on slipping into the future...
This moment is all there is... |
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Yeah, you should probably create a thread about it, let others discuss | |
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The interior of Fujiya ryokan. Kuma's buildings are often deceptively simple and make use of ancient materials, especially wood.CreditStefan Ruiz
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And yet he betrayed ambivalence about the project, complaining about how the Olympics may be driving up construction costs throughout the country, which especially hurt rural areas where Kuma has built some of his most important structures. Kuma — not otherwise averse to taking digs at other architects — said that, besides signing the petition, he had resisted openly criticizing Hadid's scheme at the time. The stadium site is in one of Tokyo's few notable greenbelts, a park filled with ginkgo trees erected in the early 1900s to commemorate Emperor Meiji, and it happens to be on Kuma's regular 30-minute commute between his home in the more traditional Kagurazaka district and his office in the fashionable Minami-Aoyama neighborhood. "I know that area very well," he said, matter-of-factly noting that Hadid's scheme simply "would not fit." "I go by it every day," he said, as if that alone was the reason he was building the stadium. Though the resulting plan is inevitably a compromise among a number of demanding parties — Taisei Corporation (a construction company), Azusa Sekkei Co. (a design firm) and the government of Japan itself — it is, like much of Kuma's work, rather simple in its initial impression and as unobtrusive as a massive stadium can be. Multitiered but relatively squat (at under 50 meters high, it is one-third lower than Hadid's design), its roof unpeels to reveal a latticed wood framework. Renderings show the concourses dotted with trees, and the entire complex is hugged by parkland, pointedly emphasizing its relationship with the natural landscape. The building's 2,000 cubic meters of cedar and larch are supposed to come from every prefecture in Japan (though recently, there have been protests about a subcontractor's alleged contribution to deforestation in Borneo). It is, though not explicitly intended as such, a diametric statement against futuristic and self-aggrandizing designs like Hadid's — and perhaps futuristic and self-aggrandizing architecture in general. Kuma's luminous, spare, predominantly wood-hewn buildings often look out of place among the stark shapes that fill architecture magazines and journals. His is an architecture that seems at first glance to exude tradition and "Japan-ness," but it turns out to be one of allusions, tricks of the eye and uncertain thresholds and limits. Surfaces mislead and deceive; materials are returned to again and again, like an obsession; the gestures to high Modernism are rejected, reassumed and renewed. Kuma, a constant source of paradoxes and ironies, often makes demagogic statements on behalf of his own brand of architectural modesty. "I want to change the definition of architecture," he told me; in a way, he already has. BY ITS NATURE, wood does not lend itself to spectacle. A common material in Japanese traditional architecture until the firebombing of World War II (which is to say, about 10 years before Kuma was born), it weathers easily and visibly, requires constant attention and replacement and exudes impermanence, fragility and modesty. Kuma gravitates toward it relentlessly, appropriate for someone who told me that "architects should be very shy, everywhere."
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Kengo Kuma wins Sydney 'Stacking Forest' design bid
http://www.perspectiveglobal.com/architecture/kengo-kuma-wins-sydney-bid-with-stacking-forest-design/
Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has won a big to build the latest in a serious of towers among Sydney's Waterloo development Globally acclaimed architect Kengo Kuma, in partnership with Australia-based firm Koichi Takada Architects, has been named as the winner in a competition to design the Crown Group's new tower for Sydney's Waterloo development. The entire facade becomes a vertical urban forest by having vegetation on each eave The tower will form part of a five-building development. The 19-storey building will feature an infinity-edge rooftop pool, gym and community room and green exterior designed to represent a stacked forest. The development also includes three buildings designed exclusively by Koichi Takada Architects and a building designed by Sydney-based architects Silvester Fuller. "The entire facade becomes a vertical urban forest by having vegetation on each eave," commented Kuma. "The upper volume of the tower seamlessly transforms into the lower part of the stepped terraces in order to create an intimacy between the building scale and the pedestrian scale on the street level."
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