Kengo Kuma’s vision of Tokyo

By D.McN. | TOKYO

WHEN KENGO KUMA was ten years old, his father took him to the Yoyogi National Stadium, the centrepiece of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. In a city still recovering from wartime carpet-bombing, the modernist masterpiece, with its sleek lines and soaring roof, looked like the future. “From that moment I knew I wanted to be an architect,” he says.

Mr Kuma, now 64, still admires Kenzo Tange, the stadium’s designer, but at some point in the 1990s he turned against the synthetic, bombastic architecture that had dominated Tokyo since the war. The city’s ancient heritage, particularly its green spaces and spidery waterways, had been razed in the rush to rebuild. “I began to think that we should live with nature rather than dominate it,” he says. Mr Kuma’s goal now is to integrate buildings into their environment and use local materials, a method he calls “recovering the place”. His latest attempt to put it into practice is the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, a pair of craggy inverted pyramids by the River Tay meant to invoke the Scottish cliffs, which opened in September. It is just one of roughly 100 projects Mr Kuma’s practice is handling around the world at any one time.