iU President Gachon . Mr.Kengo Kuma

 ■iU President Gachon . Mr.Kengo Kuma

Shohei Otani, Ichiro, Naoya Inoue, Yuzuru Hanyu, Naomi Osaka, Akira Toriyama, Eiichiro Oda, Hayao Miyazaki, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Shigeru Miyamoto, Yoko Ono, Yohji Yamamoto, Haruki Murakami... As a world-famous Japanese person, this person will also be ranked high.

What we are focusing on now

We are trying a different way of working in our office. In addition to Tokyo, we have offices in Paris, Beijing, and Shanghai, but Tokyo is still the center of our work. We have been working by cramming people into a big box in a big city. We need to break out of that.

He will create several satellites in the regions and live between them himself and his staff. It's a kind of modern-day alternate attendance system. It would be nice to be able to experience the seasonal climate and food at the satellites. Higashikawa in Hokkaido. The water is clean. He built a wooden satellite called "Furniture House" and started work in April 2022. The office is a renovated building located down from Kokusai Street in Okinawa to the market. There is a wine and sausage shop below. A building in the mountains in Maniwa, Okayama Prefecture, one of the centers of Japan's lumber industry, has been renovated into a satellite office. It is scheduled to open in 2022.

By connecting several satellite offices, we are not only dispersing the people in our Tokyo office, but also trying to create a base for interaction between young designers and students in the regions. We are most interested in trying out a new network-based, mobile working style in this way.

About the school

My view of school changed drastically when I studied architecture. Until then, I thought there was a correct answer and that school was the place to teach it. The architecture department is a little different, and if you give the same answer as others, you'll be ridiculed. You have to give an answer that's different from others. I realized that there is no correct answer.

When I submitted my work, various teachers would give me completely different comments about it, and in some cases the teachers would argue with each other. Teachers do not represent one correct answer, each has a different idea and represents a different philosophy. I learned in the Department of Architecture that the world is a place of struggle between people with different ideas, different philosophies, and different interests.

I wanted to deny the actions I had taken at school up until then, which was to pursue the right answer. When I studied abroad in the United States, I saw that American teachers were more diverse than in Japan, and teachers argued heatedly with each other. Seeing this, I realized that Japanese architecture departments were still too lenient. A change in outlook on life. To what extent can I deny the right answer? In a sense, it was school that taught me this. I was able to see the diversity of people at school, which allowed me to embark on a different path. I hope that young people will make good use of school in this way.

◆Message for you guys

What I would most like to recommend is traveling. When I was in university, I realized that there was no right answer, so I gave up on the designs that were considered mainstream in the world of architecture at the time (such as Arata Isozaki) and went to investigate a village in the Sahara Desert in Africa. During my travels, I was able to communicate with local people and meet people who lived in a place with different values than I had before. Being able to come back from that trip also gave me confidence in my physical strength. Traveling is the best chance to train yourself. I would like to tell young people to try traveling that no one else does.