Seng KUAN is completing a dissertation on the architect TANGE Kenzō and the emergence of urban design in transwar and early postwar Japan. He is the curator of Utopia across Scales, andhis publications include Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (2002) and Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China (2004). He contributed an essay, “Public Architecture and Private Practice: Dong Dayou and the Greater Shanghai Project,” to the edited volume Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (forthcoming).
YATSUKA Hajime is professor of architecture at the Shibaura Institute of Technology. He was a member of Tange’s laboratory and studied with Sachio OTANI and Arata ISOZAKI, both protégés of Tange. Among his book publications are studies of the Russian Avant Garde (1993), Metabolism (1997), and an intellectual history of modern Japanese architecture (2005). As an architectural critic, his essays and editorial work can be found in journals such as Kenchiku Bunka, 10+1, Oppositions, and AA Files. He is currently organizing a large exhibition on Tange and the Metabolists, which will open in 2011, while also working on an English book project entitled "Metabolism Nexus."
TOYOKAWA Saikaku is assistant professor at Oyama National College of Technology. TOYOKAWA received his PhD in architecture from Tokyo University in 2006 with a highly acclaimed thesis on Tange.
Yasufumi NAKAMORI is a PhD candidate in art history at Cornell University and assistant curator in photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2008 at the museum, he completed the acquisition of nearly 300 photographs by ISHIMOTO Yasuhiro, created between 1951 and 2003. His forthcoming exhibitions include Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photography of Ishimoto Yasuhiro which will be accompanied with a catalogue of the same title (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Yale University Press, 2010). The exhibition is developed from one chapter of his dissertation “Imagining Cities: Visions of Avant-Garde Architects and Artists from 1953 to 1970 Japan.”
Sarah TEASLEY is tutor in the Departments of History of Design and Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art. She will publish two books in 2010: a critical history of design in modern Japan with Reaktion Books, and Global Design History, an edited volume with Routledge. Her next book project, drawing on her PhD dissertation for the University of Tokyo, will address media technologies, social networks and furniture design and manufacturing in imperial Japan.
Ken Tadashi OSHIMA is associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is author of Arata Isozaki (2009) and International Architecture in Interwar Japan (forthcoming, 2009), which focuses on the architects HORIGUCHI Sutemi, YAMADA Mamoru, and Antonin RAYMOND. Oshima co-curated the exhibition Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond (2006-7) and authored an essay on Japanese prefabrication for Home Delivery(Museum of Modern Art, 2008).
Jonathan REYNOLDS is associate professor of art history at Barnard College / Columbia University and is currently Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. His research has centered on the history of modern Japanese architecture, and his first book focused particularly on MAEKAWA Kunio's role in pre- and postwar architectural practice (2001). His current book project, “Allegories of Time and Space: Visualizing Japanese Cultural Identity through Architecture and Photography,” will explore the role of the concept of tradition in the construction of cultural identity in Japanese architecture, photography, and popular culture from the 1940s to the 1990s.
The workshop on October 17 will attempt to map out major vectors of inquiry concerning TANGE Kenzō's architectural and urbanist legacy,and will be characterized by group-driven discussion in a seminar-like context. Attendees will represent a mix of specialists in TANGE Kenzō, modern Japanese architecture, modern Japanese art and history,and postwar architecture and urbanism.