BACKSTORY Some notes on Kengo Kuma's project to re-enchant Contemporary Architecture through Material Research

摘要

Though often deemed the oldest art form, even dubbed in traditional Western philosophy "Mother of the Arts," Contemporary Architecture as the discipline is understood today is perhaps the youngest of all art forms practiced. I have elaborated this argument elsewhere in greater detail, associating its birth in the United States in 1963 with the completion of the rural electric project, that is, the complete electrification, interior and exterior, of all buildings in the nation, urban and rural, and in parallel in all other first world as the first generation "killer apps" of this infant air conditioning, television, ubiquitous 24-hr lighting from exterior to interior teamed with to amplify the increasing pressure exerted by pre-existing technologies of modern transportation, the radio, the plane and the car, toward a middle class society founded on individual freedoms (urban) as against communitarian values (rural).