Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Having been brought up and educated in Tokyo he sailed to America making landfall at Seattle. At Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and later on at Harvard University his real training began. Both institutions were then of course principal sites of a transplanted postwar European modernism in architecture and at Harvard also in urban design. Whether under Saarinen’s or Gropius’s tutelage considerations of theory were rigorously subordinate to practice. If American education had shortcomings they were naive rather than utopic albeit Cranbrook’s approach may today seem nostalgic the aims of such education were unified and comprehensive rather than complex or disparate. Interestingly like the Tsuchiura House in Tokyo that Maki sometimes mentions as having seen as a child (a modest work of 1935 in the International Style by a former Japanese employee of Wright) the notions of modemism that confronted Maki (propounded at Harvard by J.-L. Sert and others) were touched by an American context. The cultural mediation thus implied by this sea change was markedly less restrictive or one might say insular than in either Japan or Britain at the time of Maki’s U.S. sojourn. In terms of the record it happens that no other Japanese architect of the past century profited from just this exposure. Nor on Maki’s return to Japan in 1965 were the results including the additional benefit of a year’s unrestricted travel (manly throughout east and west Asia on a Graham Foundation Fellowship) immediately felt There was much so do including the foundation rites of the Metabolist movement and the quantum feap in the anchitectural and civic reconstruction of Tokyo initiated by the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games and its spin-off projects. Maki was deeply insolved but his participation was literally distanced-if not as a recent returnee in prastive westhar curtailed in any event postwar urban design and architecture in Japan were dominated by the CLAM linked desilogy and achaevements of Kenzo Tange notably in terms of the impact that Japanese comeyad abnad. (LL)