KUMA'S DISAPPEARANCE, AN INTRODUCTION TO ANTI-OBJECT

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?
Kengo Kuma

Written in a manner that swings gently between manifesto and self-analysis, Kengo Kuma's Anti-Object presents a timely critical evaluation of 'self-centred' architecture that is deliberately distinct from its surroundings. Kuma labels such buildings or landscapes 'objects' and, as his title suggests, his interest lies elsewhere. Kuma observes how the impulses of what he calls an 'objectivisation' of the world have permeated modern architectural culture, for which he seeks redress in ways both surprising and subtle. In the process, he deconstructs the philosophical pitfalls of modern subjectivism as well as the tired clichés of contemporary architectural contextualism. As he says, 'No particular skill or effort is required to turn something into an object. Preventing a thing from becoming an object is a far more difficult task.'

Emerging from this is what we might call a situational architectural sensibility, whose currency derives from the author’s distinctive voice regarding the impact of new digital and information technologies on architecture. For Kuma, the kinds of fragmentation we now experience in our daily (heavily mediated) lives create a condition that makes urgent a radical new kind of architectural project: an architecture of disappearance. ’My ultimate aim’ he writes early on in this book, ‘ is to “erase” architecture’. Such an ambition couldn’t be further removed from the majority of a younger generation of digital experimentalists today, pursuing a renewal of formalism not seen within architecture for decades. For the purposes of conjuring up an image of Kuma’s contrary aim (and owing especially to the beautiful glass surfaces in his buildings that refract images of their overgrown surrounding landscapes), I would suggest that you think here of John McTiernan’s sci-fi classic The Predator: and alien entity moving swiftly and effortlessly and near invisibly through its natural surroundings. Like McTiernan or the theorist Paul Virilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.

That the architect of one of the most jarring and visually disturbing examples of postmodern historicism (the surreal M2 Tokyo office building completed in 1991 to great attention and acclaim) could call for an architecture of disappearance seems hardly believable, at first glance. But one of the ironies of the text, with its steady appeal to the benefits of contextualism, is that it has clearly afforded the author an opportunity to contextualize his own body of work through considered self-reflection. This modest book is thus the rarest kind of writing in architecture today: an extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment and redirection for an architect at the mid-point of his career. Accordingly, we are pleased to be able to present it here in a first full English translation, as a book that embodies a central ambition of AA Words: to forster and promote architectural texts in an era otherwise dominated by visual excess and an endless circulation of images. This is a compelling context for the book that follows, a context in which it fits – and at times dissolves –seamlessly.

Brett Steele
August 2008