Kisho Kurokawa: Metabolism + Recent Work

As part of the Japan 2001 festival, Cube invited Japan’s most celebrated architect today - Kisho Kurokawa - to present an ambitious exhibition examining a wide range of his architectural output. The exhibition commences with a review of the pioneering and innovative postwar phase, where he was involved with the Metabolists, through to his most recent developments exemplifying eco-media planning. Above all else the exhibition is about Kurokawa’s unrelenting passion and thoughts on architecture fused with his philosophical ideas – and in particular his philosophy of symbiosis which has established him as one of the world’s leading thinkers on architecture.

From as early as 1959 Kisho Kurokawa was putting forward a new architectural paradigm which envisaged cities and architecture as organisms capable of growth and change. He called this symbiosis. Kurokawa argues that we have moved inexorably from an architectural culture based on the Modernists’ commitment to the Machine, to a new epoch which he calls the ‘Age of Life’. This ‘life principle’ has informed and inspired his architectural development over the last forty years.

Without doubt "any ranking system of contemporary architects", as Peter Wislocki puts it, "would have to put Kurokawa near the top of the global ranking superleague". At the age of only twenty-six he was the leading force in developing the Metabolism Group in 1959, a movement anticipating many of today’s concerns with building intelligence, responsive environments and design for change. Since then his output has been prolific; his architectural activities extend from Japan to the US, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa – and a library of monographs and numerous awards, honorary degrees and invitations to lecture from every corner of the world testify to his enduring quality.

Clearly most architects would be quite happy with this but for Kurokawa his philosophical pursuits have been equally gratifying, fuelling his architectural development. "I consider architecture to be an expression of philosophy…Therefore an architect must be a philosopher who discerns the spirit of the age." In today’s fasting changing world, with the diversity of life, the complexity of nature, the ambiguity of culture coupled with high density cities, Kurokawa is in tune with the continually shifting zeitgeist and interprets it in his own unique and intuitive way.

www.kisho.co.jp

Exhibition catalogue
A fully illustrated catalogue has been edited by Dennis Sharp for Kisho Kurokawa: Metabolism+Recent Work, London Book Art at £9.95 available in the Riba Bookshop at Cube

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