Maekawa Kunio And The Emergence Of Japanese Modernist Architecture

Download or read book Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture written by Jonathan M. Reynolds and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-07-19 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese architecture's commanding presence on the world stage can be traced to the struggles of earlier generations of Japan's modernist architects. This first book-length study of Maekawa Kunio (1905-1986) focuses on one of the most distinctive leaders in Japan's modernist architectural community. In a career spanning the 1930s to the 1980s, Maekawa's work and critical writing put him in the vanguard of the Japanese architectural profession. Jonathan Reynolds illuminates Maekawa's role as a bridge between prewar and postwar architecture in Japan, focusing particularly on how he influenced modernism's ambivalence regarding "tradition" and contemporary practice and the importance of technology in modernist design and ideology. Maekawa studied architecture at the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University before moving to Paris in 1928 to work with Le Corbusier. The latter experience had a powerful impact on Maekawa; he became an advocate for Le Corbusier and modernism when he returned to Japan two years later. Throughout his career Maekawa designed residential, commercial, and government buildings in Japan and abroad. He became particularly well known internationally for his approach to public architecture, especially museums and public spaces such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall. These projects illustrated the principles that earned Maekawa the respect and admiration of architects the world over. Carefully researched, with numerous illustrations that complement discussions of Maekawa's principal projects, Reynolds's book will be welcomed in the fields of architecture and design. It will also attract readers interested in twentieth-century Japan, for in addition to highlighting Maekawa's architectural career, Reynolds portrays the broader cultural context within which Maekawa and other Japanese architects and artists sought to be heard and recognized.

Download or read book International Architecture in Interwar Japan written by Ken Tadashi Ōshima and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following World War I, a generation of young architects in Japan took part in a movement toward "international architecture," or kokusai kenchiku, designing houses for people who blended Japanese and Western customs in their daily lives, and public buildings--from schools and hospitals to weather stations and golf clubhouses--that encompassed modern forms and new materials, especially earthquake-resistant reinforced concrete, yet systhesized the new with the old.--Ken Tadashi Oshima is assistant professor of architecture at the University of Washington.

Download or read book The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture written by David B. Stewart and published by Kodansha. This book was released on 1987 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the rise of modern architecture in Japan since 1868 and the interaction between tradition and innovation, East and West.

Download or read book Allegories of Time and Space written by Jonathan M. Reynolds and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegories of Time and Space explores efforts by leading photographers, artists, architects, and commercial designers to re-envision Japanese cultural identity during the turbulent years between the Asia Pacific War and the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s. This search for a cultural home was a matter of broad public concern, and each of the artists under consideration engaged a wide audience through mass media. The artists under study had in common the necessity to establish distance from their immediate surroundings temporally or geographically in order to gain some perspective on Japan's rapidly changing society. They shared what Jonathan Reynolds calls an allegorical vision, a capacity to make time and space malleable, to see the present in the past and to find an irreducible cultural center at Japan's geographical periphery. The book commences with an examination of the work of Hamaya Hiroshi. A Tokyo native, Hamaya began to photograph the isolated "snow country" of northeastern Japan in the midst of the war. His empathetic images of village life expressed an aching nostalgia for the rural past widely shared by urban Japanese. Following a similar strategy in his search for authentic Japan was the photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei. Although Tōmatsu originally traveled to Okinawa Prefecture in 1969 to document the destructive impact of U.S. military bases in the region in his characteristically edgy style, he came to believe that Okinawa was still in some sense more truly Japanese than the Japanese main islands. The self-styled iconoclast artist Okamoto Tarō emphatically rejected the delicacy and refinement conventionally associated with Japanese art in favor of the hyper-modern qualities of the dynamic and brutal aesthetics that he saw expressed on the ceramics of the prehistoric Jōmon period. One who quickly recognized the potential in Okamoto's embrace of Japan's ancient past was the architect Tange Kenzō. As a point of comparison, Reynolds looks at the portrayal of the ancient Shintō shrine complex at Ise in a volume produced in collaboration with the photographer Watanabe Yoshio. Reynolds shows how this landmark book contributed significantly to a transformation in the meaning of Ise Shrine by suppressing the shrine's status as an ultranationalist symbol and re-presenting the shrine architecture as design consistent with rigorous modernist aesthetics. In the 1970s and 1980s, there circulated widely through advertising posters of the designer Ishioka Eiko, the ephemeral "nomadic" architecture of Itō Toyo'o, TV documentaries, and other media, a fantasy that imagined Tokyo's young female office workers as urban nomads. These cosmopolitan dreams may seem untethered from their Japanese cultural context, but Reynolds reveals that there were threads linking the urban nomad with earlier efforts to situate contemporary Japanese cultural identity in time and space. In its fresh and nuanced re-reading of the multiplicities of Japanese tradition during a tumultuous and transformative period, Allegories of Time and Space offers a compelling argument that the work of these artists enhanced efforts to redefine tradition in contemporary terms and, by doing so, promoted a future that would be both modern and uniquely Japanese.

Download or read book Japan and the West written by Neil Jackson and published by Lund Humphries Publishers Limited. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the architectural influence that Japan and the West have had on each other during the last 150 years. While the recent histories of Western and Japanese architecture have been well recorded, they have rarely been interwoven. Based on extensive research, Japan and the West provides a synthetic overview that brings together the main themes of Japanese and Western architecture since 1850 and shows that neither could exist in its present state without the other. It should be no surprise that Meiji architecture drew heavily upon Western precedents, or that Le Corbusier was strongly influenced by the Japanese minka. In considering these histories, this book demonstrates the mutual inter-dependence of both architectural cultures while, at the same time, acknowledging their differences. In conclusion, the book moves beyond style and structure to the Japanese concept of ma -- the pause or the space between, and demonstrates how this concept has found a place in Western architecture.

Download or read book Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1959 written by Rika Devos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in both Paris and Brussels; of a series of expositions in Moscow; of the Universal Exhibition in Rome that was planned to open in 1942; and of London’s South Bank Exposition of 1951: all of them related, in one way or another, to either an anticipation of the global war or to its horrific aftermaths. A brief discussion of three pre-World War II American expositions that are reviewed in the Epilogue supports this point. It indicates a significant difference in the attitude of American exposition commissioners, who were less attuned to the looming war than their European counterparts. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation. Whether in the service of Fascist Italy or of Imperial Japan, of Republican Spain or of the post-war Franquista regime, of the French Popular Front or of socialist Yugoslavia, of the arising FRG or of capitalist USA, of Stalinist Russia or of post-colonial Britain, exposition architecture during the period in question was driven by a deep faith in its ability to represent ideology. The book argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.

Download or read book Modern Asian Design written by D.J. Huppatz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Asian Design provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of Asian design in the modern period, both tracing historical threads and offering a theoretical framework within which to chart the history of design in Asia. Rather than a singular “Asian history”, this book presents a series of studies centred on trade routes, colonial relationships, regional networks and cross-cultural exchanges. Modern Asian Design builds on existing resources beyond design history in an effort to map the field, focusing particularly on relations between Asia and the West and also across Asian design cultures. Opening with a brief overview of trade and exchange networks in the 17th and 18th centuries, the bulk of this study comprises analysis of the development of modern design in Asia during the later 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of rapid modernisation. The book's final two chapters bring these central ideas into a contemporary and highly relevant context.