Message from Kengo Kuma
We propose “The New Lifestyle”
The New Lifestyle is a way of life that is deeply rooted in a location. Location is another name for the system in which everything about that place – climate, culture, industry and people – is integrated in a most natural way. This system, however, disappeared in the city-oriented society of the 20th century that solely pursued efficiency and convenience. People preferred purchasing mass produced items, and locally-created products gradually lost their power under the naming of “traditional handicrafts.”
3.11 put this fact under our nose. And The New Lifestyle is a way of living to reverse this course of the 20th century, when notion of location had been lost.
Together with the craftspeople from the Tohoku Region (or the East Japan), we propose products for The New Lifestyle. What we present are not at all exclusive or pretentious traditional crafts, but are “new types of daily tools,” which we use regularly in our everyday life. They are the equipments for ourselves to carry on with life in our location, and to take part in a larger circulatory system called location.
Kengo Kuma