Kazuo Shinohara: On the Threshold of Space Making is the first study to place Shinohara's overlooked institutional works alongside his iconic houses, making the case for a unified architectural vision that moves between the domestic and the urban.
About This Book
Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) spent decades refining an architectural language that was simultaneously austere and charged with surprise — purist houses that reshaped how postwar Japan understood domesticity, structure, and tradition. Yet his later institutional-scale projects had, until this volume, remained largely unexamined. Edited by Seng Kuan and published jointly by Lars Müller Publishers and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, this book reframes Shinohara's entire oeuvre by insisting on the equivalence between house and city as a continuous intellectual project. New scholarly essays, first-hand interviews with clients and collaborators, and key texts in translation sit alongside previously unpublished archival drawings and Shinohara's own travel photographs — situating one of Japan's most significant postwar architects within both a national cultural context and a global conversation about space-making.
Key Features
- 320 pages of scholarly essays, translated texts, archival drawings, and personal photography
- Edited by Seng Kuan; published jointly by Lars Müller Publishers and Harvard University Graduate School of Design
- Previously unpublished archival drawings and personal travel photographs by Shinohara
- Interviews with clients and collaborators, alongside translations of Shinohara's key texts
- Published by Lars Müller Publishers / Harvard GSD, 2006
What You'll Discover
- How Shinohara's formalist approach fused simplicity and structural surprise to produce a distinctly poetic architectural language
- The argument for equivalence between the house and the city as the organising principle of Shinohara's entire body of work
- A reassessment of his institutional-scale projects — works largely overlooked until this publication — and their relationship to the iconic early houses
- The broader cultural and social conditions in postwar Japan that shaped Shinohara's influence on subsequent generations of Japanese architects
About the Author
Seng Kuan is the editor of this volume, which was produced in association with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 320
- Dimensions: 205 x 250mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783037785331
- Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers / Harvard University Graduate School of Design
- Publication Date: 2006
Perfect For: Architects and students of Japanese modernism, historians of postwar architecture, and designers engaged with questions of domesticity, urban scale, and architectural formalism.