| This dissertation analyzes transformations in the Japanese architectural profession, focussing on both the home and the city during the pivotal interwar decades. In contrast to previous scholarship (primarily in Japanese) which isolates Japanese modern architecture from architecture in the Euro/American sphere of influence, this study traces the multi-lateral connections between Europe, the Americas and Asia. Rather than relying on a monograph, a dichotomy or an overall view, I have focused on the careers of three leading modernists in Japan: Yamada Mamoru (1894–1966), Horiguchi Sutemi (1895–1984), and Antonin Raymond (1888–1976). Their practices spanned an era of “international architecture” in which architecture became subject to rapid change world wide, not only through technological innovation but also through an exchange of information and an increase in global travel.{09}In their distinctive ways, each architect sought to create a new architecture comprising modern forms, materials, and programs—at once responsive to the physical and social-cultural context of Japan, yet fully aware of an emerging “international” idiom. These separate careers provide a concrete means to explore several professional and personal experiences, thereby suggesting multiple ways in which modernism was configured within both local and global contexts. Although most of their works addressed in this study have been demolished and no longer exist today, this dissertation seeks to reconstruct the nature of design practice together with the materiality of structures through archival material and photographs. Seen collectively, the intention of this re-constitution is to afford an insight into the lived and imagined experience of the interwar period, so as to provide a further foundation for our understanding of the international practices of Japanese architects today. |
