Kengo Kuma: back to nature

摘要

Kengo Kuma delivered the Annual Architecture Lecture at the Royal Academy with much of the modest understatement that characterises his buildings. In fact you might have thought it a simple slide show of some 10 or 12 delicate projects, about which the architect had relatively little to say. But the presentation of theory was visual not verbal, and the cumulative effect a conviction that here was a man who had discovered a secret door into another world of architecture. The history of Kuma's development, which was not touched on in the lecture, includes a large amount of work during the boom years of the mid-1980s, the culmination of a fevered Japanese architectural scene that had included the bizarre concrete works of Kamiya Itsuo, Monta Mozuma and Kuramoto Tatsuhiko.