SENG KUAN
u003cpu003eOne of the greatest and most influential architects of Japan's postwar generation, Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) has remained virtually unknown outside the small community of his devoted followers. As one of the leaders of architectural movement Metabolism, Shinohara achieved cult-figure stature with sublimely beautiful, purist houses that break away from Japan's postwar suburban architecture. Perhaps the most iconic of Shinohara's works, House of White (1964-66), rearranges a familiar design palette--a square plan, a pointed roof, white walls and a symbolic heart--to give an almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction. The underlying formalism in Shinohara's architecture--its basic explorations of geometry and color--lends his work a poetic quality that fuses simplicity and surprise, the ordered and the unexpected.u003c/pu003eu003cpu003eThis volume brings together new scholarship from the foremost specialists on Shinohara and Japan's modern architecture. New perspectives and historical frameworks range from the development of the small house as a building type in postwar Japan to Shinohara's engagement with French critical theory. Hitherto unpublished archival drawings and personal travel photographs by Shinohara complement the essays.u003c/pu003eu003cpu003eu003cbu003eSeng Kuanu003c/bu003e holds a PhD in architectural history from Harvard University and teaches at Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.u003c/pu003e
