Kengo Kuma

Kengo Kuma & Associates is a medium-sized architectural practice founded in 1990 in Japan with European offices based in Paris. They are involved in a wide range of design scales from furniture and product design to architecture and urban scale planning.

Kengo Kuma is a Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Tokyo and has won many awards, including the prestigious Architectural Institute of Japan Award (1997). His goal is to recover the design of traditional buildings and to reinterpret it for the 21st century utilising the inspiration of light and nature to help achieve this.

Recent projects include the 12,000sqm Art Museum for the City of Nagasaki in Japan completed by Kuma in 2005 and their designs for the Contemporary Arts Centre in Marseille, France which is currently under construction.

"The museum itself with its big and open public hall will be part of the new system of public spaces, becoming a sort of covered public square where people can go and enjoy the warm feeling of this welcoming space, just for shopping at the museum store, or for going to dinner at the restaurant or to have a drink at the café, as it happens in any successful vital public square. This creates a strong integration between outside and inside the museum, creating an offer which will be direct not only to all the visitors the museum will attract form outside Dundee, but also to Dundee's citizens, which will be able to appreciate the museum spaces as really part of their city and will be invited to live it as such."

Kengo Kuma's team for the V&A project includes cre8architecture (Scotland), ARUP (UK), Optimised Environments Ltd (Scotland) and CBA (Scotland).