Modern Architecture in Japan is Manfredo Tafuri's 1964 study of Japanese postwar architecture, now translated into English for the first time — a work written entirely from photographs and texts by a twenty-nine-year-old critic who had never set foot in Japan.
About This Book
What does it mean to interpret a building you have never visited? That is the central provocation of this slender, luminous text, in which Tafuri — already among the most incisive architectural critics of his generation — constructed an analysis of the Metabolist movement and figures such as Kenzō Tange from magazine articles and photographs alone. Originally published as L'architettura moderna in Giappone, the book was the first in a series of contemporary architecture guidebooks directed by Leonardo Benevolo. This new MACK edition, edited and introduced by Mohsen Mostafavi, surrounds Tafuri's translated text with essays by Marco Biraghi, Catherine Ingraham, Ken Tadashi Oshima, Federico Scaroni, and Hajime Yatsuka, situating his outsider's reading within the intertwined histories of Japanese architecture and Italian architectural criticism.
Key Features
- 208 pages of translated critical text, scholarly essays, and archival photography of Japanese postwar architecture
- Edited and introduced by Mohsen Mostafavi; essays by Marco Biraghi, Catherine Ingraham, Ken Tadashi Oshima, Federico Scaroni, and Hajime Yatsuka
- Examines key Metabolist figures including Kenzō Tange
- Published by MACK, 1994
What You'll Discover
- How Tafuri constructed an architectural critique of Japan's postwar built environment without direct experience of the buildings — and what that methodology reveals about the limits and possibilities of photographic mediation
- The Metabolist movement read through the lens of Italian critical theory, producing an outsider's interpretation that diverges meaningfully from insider historiography
- The relationship between Tafuri's early career and his later, more celebrated theoretical positions, illuminated through this previously untranslated text
- A multi-author scholarly apparatus that situates the text within both Japanese architectural history and the history of Italian criticism, offering readers two disciplinary traditions in dialogue
About the Author
Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) was an Italian architectural historian widely regarded as one of the most astute critics of the second half of the twentieth century. He published L'architettura moderna in Giappone in 1964 at the age of twenty-nine, as part of a series of contemporary architecture guidebooks directed by Leonardo Benevolo.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 208
- Dimensions: 150 x 205 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781913620837
- Publisher: MACK
- Publication Date: 1994
Perfect For: Architectural historians, critics, and researchers with an interest in postwar Japanese architecture, Metabolism, or the history of Italian architectural theory; scholars of Tafuri's work encountering this key early text for the first time in English.