¡°I wanted to go to a place that wasn¡¯t neat and tidy, somewhere dangerous. I was bored, and it had something to do with the era and something to do with myself too.¡±

In a recent letter to fellow architect Kazuyo Sejima, Kengo Kuma expressed in the above words the tenor of his mood and the disarray of his esprit during his student days.

¡°The end of the 1970s was a time when the mood was very much that everything had been already expressed,¡± he wrote. ¡°We had been through the passions of the student movement of the ¡®60s, and it looked very much like there was nothing new to be done, be it in architecture, literature or thought.