The University of Tokyo”s Hongo Campus is home to the Graduate School of Engineering and the (undergraduate) Faculty of Engineering. Inside the Faculty of Engineering Building 11, standing near the main gate of Hongo Campus, the lounge and hall area has been renovated and reborn as “HASEKO-KUMA HALL.”
The “Hall” will be used as a venue for international conferences, symposia, lectures and various interdisciplinary meetings and workshops. The “Lounge” will be used for diverse academic events such as exhibitions and shows and as a salon or gathering place for informal social gatherings, meetings and round-table conferences, and it is a space where you may enjoy pleasant conversations while sipping alcohol drinks in the evening hours.I would be overjoyed if the “HASEKO-KUMA HALL” would become a place for many people from diverse fields of specialty to be able to interact, exchange and relax side by side both on and off duty. Additionally, the “Hall” and “Lounge” will be open also for general use, accordingly, we also hope that the “Hall” and “Lounge” would be widely used as a space in contributing to revitalization of the surrounding neighborhoods.
An architect of international distinction, Kengo Kuma, who designed the New National Stadium for the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, is also a Department of Architecture Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering of the University of Tokyo, and who was responsible for the interior spatial renovation design of the “HASEKO-KUMA HALL.” The Haseko Group is responsible for the construction and working drawings, and also it is focusing on developing young human resources interested in architectural career.
Experiencing the “HASEKO-KUMA HALL” with the arranged numerous wooden boxes filling its space would inspire the visitor to feel the unique architectural spatial world of the professor/architect, Kengo Kuma. The wooden boxes will exhibit research results as a tool for widely transmitting and disseminating those achievements of the Graduate School of Engineering and the Faculty of Engineering.The first exhibition will feature from each majors a wide range of specimen from the very early vacuum tube manufactured more than 100 years ago to the state-of-the-art “Optical Lattice Clock” that provides 18 digits of time measurement accuracy (corresponding to an error of one second in 30 billion years). The exhibits will collectively present a number of valuables that transcend time and space which reflect the progress of overlapping development of science and technology that realized today’s society.
The United Nations (UN) issued the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in the 2015 UN Summit and enacted in 2016. The UN set 17 separate but inter-connected goals, which are all deeply related to engineering, to be achieved by 2030 to overcome the dire problems the world faces in the 21st century. Wherefore we are hoping that this space will provide a new place to exchange to those “knowledge professionals” who may provide solutions to complex social issues, open up the way to the future and lead the world to gather and interact freely and to emerge and go forward from here.
Finally, I would like to thank the Haseko Group for their donation of construction work and provision of working drawings, as well as to those who have made great efforts and assistances for the realization of this project.