Kuma e Tokyo

"At the time [1970’s, ndR], I was interested in architecture that was a mapping of the city of Tokyo. This attempt to become involved in the city through a stratagem of mapping or correspondence was in part the result of the influence of my graduate-school mentor. Hiroshi Hara. Whereas the city planning schemes of the 1960s projected certain geometries onto the city, Hara’s stratagem was to reverse that vector and to map the city inside small projects. Making free use of various “mathematical” concepts and trying to map the city inside box-like houses, he attempted to reverse the expansionist tendency shown by Tange and Kurokawa.
What I did in Small Bathhouse in Izu and M2 was to cut-and-paste Tokyo-like forms and Tolyo-like objects. At the time, I believed that an approach based on the cutting and pasting and remixing of dissimilar elements was Tokyo-like in spirit." p.14

"The Tange Research Group received all the attention at the University of Tokyo because of its splendid forms; meanwhile, the Uchida Research Group quietly explored the material and physical potential of architecture, focusing on details and structure. When I was a fourth-year undergraduate student, I learned this approach from professor Yoshichika Uchida." p.18

Studies in organic, Kengo Kuma and Associates, TOTO Publishing, Tokyo, October 2009