Watch architect Kengo Kuma live from Japan for Virtual Design Festival and CAMP

Today, Virtual Design Festival has teamed up with CAMP, Prague's centre for architecture and urban planning, to present a day of talks, starting with a live lecture by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma from 10:00am UK time. 

We will be publishing lectures from Prague's Center for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning's (CAMP) Urban Talks series all day. We kick things off with this lecture by Kuma live from his office in Tokyo.

Subsequent instalments of the series today will feature lectures by Snøhetta, COBE and Interboro. The schedule can be found at the bottom of this article.

Kuma, one of Japan's leading architects, won the competition to design the stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that have now been postponed due to coronavirus.

He recently created Ace Hotel's first hotel in Japan, in a building that was previously the Kyoto Central Telephone Company.

The architect also completed his first building in Australia this year, a six-storey civic centre in Sydney that, like many of Kuma's designs, features light-coloured wood in dynamic configurations.

Among Kuma's other most well-known projects are the V&A Dundee Museum, Scotland's first design museum, which was designed to evoke the dramatic cliffs of Scotland's coastline, and his Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Centre, designed to look like a stack of smaller buildings with sloping roofs.

In a 2017 interview with Dezeen, Kuma said he feels embarrassed by some of his more experimental early buildings, adding: "I want to find a balance expressing form and material. The form of the building should be as subtle as possible, because then the material's character can reveal itself."

Viewers will be able to ask Kuma questions during this morning's live chat via Slido, using the #urbantalks hashtag.

About CAMP

CAMP, the Center for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning, is an urban planning hotspot in the heart of Prague. The gallery is housed in a modernist building designed by Czech architect Karel Prager and serves not only architects and planners, but mainly the citizens of Prague interested in the future of their city. CAMP also hosts an exhibition space with a 25m wide panoramic projection wall, enabling a unique simulation of the city.

Its monthly Urban Talks series offers lectures by world-renowned architects and urban planners.

Here's the schedule of talks we are publishing on VDF today:

10:00am Kengo Kuma live from Japan
1:00pm Snøhetta
3:00pm COBE
5:00pm Interboro

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