Balázs Bognár

Balázs Bognár, Partner at Kengo Kuma & Associates in Tokyo, will examine the work of his office through professional and personal perspectives involving the past, the present, and the future—a subjective insider’s take, with simultaneous critique from the outside. Through selected projects, he will discuss the cultural and philosophical origins of the office, and how this affects current and future approaches. Along the way, he will highlight the sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar in regarding locale. Finally, he will suggest where an engaged architecture, a fundamentally social practice, might take us next.

Notable completed work includes 1568 Alberni in Vancouver, Canada (2023), Amanpuri’s Retail Pavilion in Phuket, Thailand (2019), Rolex Tower in Dallas, Texas (2018); Portland Japanese Garden’s Cultural Village in Oregon (2017); and Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo, Japan (2014).

Bognár lectures and writes about his work with Kengo Kuma & Associates, with commentary reflecting on the meaning of the office’s efforts within broader cultural contexts. His recent essays “Fitness on Connected Fields: Distance, Time, and Conversation” is in Asst. Prof. Miguel Guitart’s Approaching Architecture: Three Fields, One Discipline (Routledge 2022), and “Ancient Future: Materiality and Place in the Work of Kengo Kuma & Associates” has been published in the June 2023 issue of Domus, edited by Toshiko Mori. His last book Kengo Kuma: Portland Japanese Garden (Rizzoli Electa 2019) was cowritten with Prof. Botond Bognar and introduced by Kengo Kuma.

He received his Master in Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and his B.A. in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis.

Bognár is a native of Urbana, Illinois, and is based in Tokyo, Japan.