ANATOMY OF METABOLISM The exhibit "Metabolism, the City of the Future" at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is a major retrospective looking at Japan's most widely known and perhaps least understood modern architecture movement. Subtitled "Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan," the exhibit throws up images depicting a sci-fi world of floating cities, metropolises in the sky, and soaring geometric shapes and patterns repeated over and over with little apparent correspondence to the psychological needs of humans. — Published 2011.1214
	UIA WORLD CONGRESS 2011 There were fears that the great earthquake that struck eastern Japan in March 2011 would in some way lessen the UIA World Congress recently held in Tokyo by the International Union of Architects (UIA). — Published 2011.1026
	MAKI'S HILLSIDE TERRACE The Hillside Terrace project, a medium-density mixed-use development of apartments, shops, restaurants, and cultural facilities, took exactly 25 years from the first plans I drew in 1967 to the completion of its sixth phase in 1992. Although I have designed buildings and complexes far greater in physical scale over the past several decades, no other project has occupied my thoughts so continuously over time as Hillside Terrace has. — Published 2011.0406
	CONFESSIONS OF AN ARCHITECTURAL JOURNALIST Hiroshi Nakamura is an affable, easygoing guy — so much so that he even lay down on the carpet to help me and a colleague to get the right picture for a previous article. Also, I think it's fair to say that he's going places as an architect. He certainly has the right background: five years with Kengo Kuma & Associates, a number of awards, and still only 35 years old. Plus, his architectural oeuvre seems to be cannily in step with the present-day ecological zeitgeist. — Published 2010.0317
	SELF-MASS DAMPER AT TOKYO SWATCH The Swatch Group's new flagship structure in Tokyo, the Nicolas G. Hayek Center, featured in ArchitectureWeek No. 416, is built with an array of innovative elements, ranging from elevating showrooms and multistory retractable glass exterior walls to moving floors for reducing seismic forces induced in the building. — Published 2009.0401
	TOKYO SWATCH BY SHIGERU BAN The new Swatch flagship store in Tokyo's Ginza district immediately stands out from the surrounding high-end fashion boutiques on this densely packed street. There is no doorway, no visible sign, and no glass storefront. Instead, a towering four-story void in the streetscape seems to signify a civic-scale entry. — Published 2009.0218
	SUNTORY MUSEUM BY KENGO KUMA Kengo Kuma strikes a chord when he talks about the inspirations for one of his most successful projects: the new Suntory Museum of Art, built in 2007 into the side of the new Tokyo Midtown development. — Published 2008.0903
	INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE International practice sounds glamorous and fun, but is it something that your firm should consider? Overseas work can be expensive, disruptive, and a serious distraction. Some firms have even destroyed their domestic practice by diverting too much energy and too many resources to foreign work. — Published 2008.0326
	KUROKAWA ART CENTER According to architect Kisho Kurokawa, the new National Art Center Tokyo is a perfect expression of his philosophy of symbiosis. Rather than trying to iron out irregularities and resolve contradictions into what he calls a "dull, flat harmony," his distinctly non-Western idea seeks to apply conflicts and tensions in positive ways to achieve interesting and energizing effects. — Published 2007.0404
	HOUSE OF PLASTIC The designs of Japanese architect Kengo Kuma critically engage the materiality of architecture in order to challenge its usual meanings, and in so doing, to thwart the emergence of architecture as an object. As he has shown in many of his projects, Kuma is determined to "dissolve" the materials that he uses, or to choose materials that are less substantial, stating, "If materials are thoroughly particlized, they are transient, like rainbows." — Published 2005.0914

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