The Age of The Forest | Interview with Kengo Kuma

The world-renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma delivered a keynote speech during the 25th General Conference of ICOM, ICOM Kyoto 2019, on September 2.

Kengo Kuma was born in Yokohama in 1954 and in 1990 he established his own firm, Kengo Kuma & Associates, which today designs a wide variety of projects across the world with more than 200 architects based in Tokyo, China and Paris.

Kuma, who in 2016 was awarded with the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, considers his architecture as “some kind of frame of nature”. “You could say that my aim is ‘to recover the place’. The place is a result of nature and time; this is the most important aspect.”, he explained in Botond Bognar’s Material Immaterial: The New Work of Kengo Kuma.

“With it, we can experience nature more deeply and more intimately. Transparency is a characteristic of Japanese architecture; I try to use light and natural materials to get a new kind of transparency.”