ABSTRACT
Kengo Kuma’s early architecture was skillfully scenographic, proffering a postmodernism then popular in the United States. He created over-scaled, oddly exaggerated imitations of Western classicism – in Tokyo, which made the structures seem more knowingly ironic. His crowd-pleasing curling column capitals at the 1992 “M2” were also an expression of Kuma’s overseas education; he once noted that the scrolling Ionic order is the only one of the five classical orders he discovered while a student on the Columbia University campus, used
there because it expresses an academic outlook.2 Kuma’s most celebrated building in Japan’s economically exuberant Bubble period was concomitantly cartoonish and pedantic.
