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.

Download or read book Crafting a Modern World written by Kurt Helfrich and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Crafting a Modern World examines a missing chapter in the history of mid-century modernism: the story of husband and wife design team Antonin and Noemi Raymond. This is the first comprehensive book in English on the duo that creatively transformed design from 1917 to 1966."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Metabolism in Architecture written by Kishō Kurokawa and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even in a country where outstanding achievements have become almost a commonplace, the Japanese architect, Kisho Kurokawa, appears as both a remarkable and a remarkably successful man. With buildings in the United States and Eastern and Western Europe as well as in Japan, he has established an international reputation as a leading figure amongst the younger generation of architects. At the age of forty he already had thirty-five major buildings and seventeen books to his credit; four new towns are being built to his designs; he heads a company of over a hundred employees, he runs a think-tank and an urban design bureau and for variety he has his own television programme with a regular audience of some 30 million. Behind these statistics lies a prodigious vitality expressed in original and stimulating buildings. -- from book jacket.

Download or read book The Blitz and Its Legacy written by Mark Clapson and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Blitz and Its Legacy is a fascinating volume which includes war experiences of destruction, architecture, urban design, the political process of planning and reconstruction, and also popular perceptions of rebuilding. Its findings provide very timely lessons which highlight the value of learning from historical precedent. Drawing together leading scholars and new researchers from across the fields of planning, history, architecture and geography, this volume presents an historical and cultural commentary on the immediate and longer-term impacts of wartime destruction.

Download or read book A History of Japan written by Conrad Totman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an updated edition of Conrad Totman's authoritative history of Japan from c.8000 BC to the present day. The first edition was widely praised for combining sophistication and accessibility. Covers a wide range of subjects, including geology, climate, agriculture, government and politics, culture, literature, media, foreign relations, imperialism, and industrialism. Updated to include an epilogue on Japan today and tomorrow. Now includes more on women in history and more on international relations. Bibliographical listings have been updated and enlarged. Part of The Blackwell History of the World Series The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.

Download or read book Contemporary Japanese Architecture written by James Steele and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Japanese Architecture presents a clear and comprehensive overview of the historical and cultural framework that informs the work of all Japanese architects, as an introduction to an in-depth investigation of the challenges now occupying the contemporary designers who will be the leaders of the next generation. It separates out the young generation of Japanese architects from the crowded, distinguished, multi-generational field they seek to join, and investigates the topics that absorb them, and the critical issues they face within the new economic reality of Japan and a shifting global order. Salient points in the text are illustrated by beautiful, descriptive images provided by the architects and from the extensive collection of the author. By combining illustrations with timelines and graphics to explain complex ideas, the book is accessible to any student seeking to understand contemporary Japanese architecture.

Download or read book Chinese Architecture and the Beaux Arts written by Jeffrey W. Cody and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École des Beaux-Arts converged in the United States when Chinese students were given scholarships to train as architects at American universities whose design curricula were dominated by Beaux-Arts methods. Upon their return home in the 1920s and 1930s, these graduates began to practice architecture and create China’s first architectural schools, often transferring a version of what they had learned in the U.S. to Chinese situations. The resulting complex series of design-related transplantations had major implications for China between 1911 and 1949, as it simultaneously underwent cataclysmic social, economic, and political changes. After 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic, China experienced a radically different wave of influence from the Beaux-Arts through advisors from the Soviet Union who, first under Stalin and later Khrushchev, brought Beaux-Arts ideals in the guise of socialist progress. In the early twenty-first century, China is still feeling the effects of these events. Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts examines the coalescing of the two major architectural systems, placing significant shifts in architectural theory and practice in China within relevant, contemporary, cultural, and educational contexts. Fifteen major scholars from around the world analyze and synthesize these crucial events to shed light on the dramatic architectural and urban changes occurring in China today—many of which have global ramifications. This stimulating and generously illustrated work is divided into three sections, framed by an introduction and a postscript. The first focuses on the convergence of Chinese architecture and the École des Beaux-Arts, outlining the salient aspects of each and suggesting how and why the two "met" in the U.S. The second section centers on the question of how Chinese architects were influenced by the Beaux-Arts and how Chinese architecture was changed as a result. The third takes an even closer look at the Beaux-Arts influence, addressing how innovative practices, new schools of architecture, and buildings whose designs were linked to Beaux-Arts assumptions led to distinctive new paradigms that were rooted in a changing China. By virtue of its scope, scale, and scholarship, this volume promises to become a classic in the fields of Chinese and Western architectural history. Contributors: Tony Atkin, Peter J. Carroll, Yung Ho Chang,Jeffrey W. Cody, Kerry Sizheng Fan, Fu Chao-Ching, Gu Daqing, Seng Kuan,Delin Lai, Xing Ruan, Joseph Rykwert, Nancy S. Steinhardt, David VanZanten, Rudolf Wagner, Zhang Jie, Zhao Chen.

Download or read book House and Home in Modern Japan written by Jordan Sand and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants’ lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era. As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants’ social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan."

Download or read book Setting the Scene written by Alistair Fair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twentieth century, an increasingly diverse range of buildings and spaces was used for theatre. Theatre architecture was re-formed by new approaches to staging and performance, while theatre was often thought to have a reforming role in society. Innovation was accompanied by the revival and reinterpretation of older ideas. The contributors to this volume explore these ideas in a variety of contexts, from detailed discussions of key architects’ work (including Denys Lasdun, Peter Moro, Cedric Price and Heinrich Tessenow) to broader surveys of theatre in West Germany and Japan. Other contributions examine the Malmö Stadsteater, ’ideal’ theatres in post-war North America, ’found space’ in 1960s New York, and Postmodernity in 1980s East Germany. Together these essays shed new light on this complex building type and also contribute to the wider architectural history of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Ultra Modernism written by Edward Denison and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first half of the twentieth century was fraught with global tensions and political machinations. However, for all the destruction in that period, these geopolitical conditions in Manchuria cultivated an extraordinary variety of architecture and urban planning, which has completely escaped international attention until now. With over forty carefully chosen images, Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria is the first book in English that illustrates Manchuria’s encounter with modernity through its built environment. Edward Denison and Guangyu Ren take readers through Russia’s early territorial claims, Japan’s construction of the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), and the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932. The book examines in detail the creation of modern cities along the SMR and focuses on three of the most important modern urban centres in Manchuria: the Russian-dominated city of Harbin, the port of Dalian, and the new capital of Manchukuo, Hsinking (Changchun). Like so much of the world outside ‘the West’ during the twentieth century, Manchuria’s encounter with modernity is merely a faint whisper drowned out by the deafening master narrative of Western-centric modernism. This book attempts to redress an imbalance in the modern history of China by studying the impact of Japan on architecture and planning beyond the depredations of the Sino-Japanese War. ‘Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria is a concise, fascinating reminder of northeast China’s transformation a century ago, when it was known as Manchuria. Denison and Ren show how Dalian, Shenyang, Changchun, and Harbin went from a sleepy port, a decaying imperial seat, and small agricultural settlements to sleek, manicured metropolises linked by the world’s longest railway to Europe. This is an excellent addition to both syllabus and bookshelf.’ —Michael Meyer, author of In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China and The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed ‘Manchuria today conjures up images of rusting heavy industry and a hostile environment. But beneath the coal dust is a built environment that was once at the cutting edge of what was meant to be modern. This creative and comprehensive book takes readers back to a time when the region was an outdoor laboratory for modernity and cosmopolitanism.’ —James Carter, author of Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City, 1916–1932

Download or read book Traditional Japanese Architecture written by Mira Locher and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining the Japanese history of buildings and building designs from prehistory to modern day, lovers of Japan will develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of this island country. Simplicity, sensitivity to the natural environment, and the use of natural materials are the hallmarks of Japanese architecture. The Art of Japanese Architecture provides a broad overview of traditional Japanese architecture in its historical and cultural context. It begins with a discussion of prehistoric dwellings and concludes with a description of modern Japanese buildings. Important historical influences and trends--notably the introduction of Buddhist culture from Korea and China, the development of feudalism, and the influence of modern Western styles of building--are all discussed in detail as facets of Japanese design. Through all of these changes, a restrained architectural tradition developed in marked contrast to an exuberant tradition characterized by monumentality and the use of bold colors. The book provides tremendous insights into the dynamic nature of Japanese architecture and how it reflects an underlying diversity within Japanese culture. The book is profusely illustrated with over 370 color photographs, woodblock prints, maps, diagrams, and specially commissioned watercolors.