Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) was one of the greatest and most influential architects of Japan's
postwar generation. He created sublimely beautiful purist houses that have reconfigured and
enriched our understanding of domesticity tradition structure scale nature and the city.
The underlying formalism in Shinohara's architecture lends his work a poetic quality that fuses
simplicity and surprise the ordered and the unexpected. More than anyone else he laid the
foundations for the rigor and vitality of architecture in Japan today. In placing Shinohara's
later institutional-scale works which have been overlooked until now alongside the iconic
houses of his earlier career this book establishes the architect's insistence on the
equivalation between the house and the city. New scholarly essays interviews with clients and
collaborators and translations of Shinohara's key texts are complemented by previously
unpublished archival drawings and personal travel photographs by Shinohara. The volume reframes
his architectural achievements in terms of his oeuvre as a whole and situates them in the
broader cultural and social context in Japan and globally.
