Seng Kuan – författare

Kenzo Tange (1913 - 2005) is a peerless figure among twentieth-century Japanese architects, unmatched in his talent, influence, and versatility. This collection of essays represents a new generation of original research that reframes Tange in the context of Japan's unique embrace of modern architecture as well as global discourses of cultural identity, technology, and the synthesis of the arts. Case studies on celebrated works clarify Tange's wide-ranging interests and design methodology through collaboration with allied fields such as art, engineering, furniture design, and photography. The book will appeal to both specialists and general readers with an interest in the visual culture and built environment of modern Japan.

One of the greatest and most influential architects of Japan’s postwar generation, Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) has remained virtually unknown outside the small community of devoted followers. As one of the leaders of architectural movement Metabolism, Shinohara achieved cult-figure stature with sublimely beautiful, purist houses that break away from Japan’s postwar suburban architecture.Perhaps the most iconic of Shinohara’s works, House of White (1964–66), rearranges a familiar design palette—a square plan, a pointed roof, white walls, and a symbolic heart pillar—to give almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction. The underlying formalism in Shinohara’s architecture—its basic explorations of geometry and color— lends his work a poetic quality that fuses simplicity and surprise, the ordered and the unexpected.This volume brings together new scholarship from the foremost specialists on Shinohara and Japan’s modern architecture. New perspectives and historical frameworks range from the development of the small house as a building type in postwar Japan to Shinohara’s engagement with French critical theory. Hitherto unpublished archival drawings and personal travel photographs by Shinohara complement the essays.