New York Times article: Designer for a Postwar World by Amy Qin NAHA, Japan — He has been called the “emperor of Japanese architecture” by his peers and “visionary” by critics. Now, the internationally renowned architect Arata Isozaki can add yet another tribute: the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The announcement on Tuesday of architecture’s highest…

From ArchDaily by María Francisca González Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect and winner of the Pitzker Prize 2019, is not only renowned for his fruitful portfolio of works built all over the world (more than a hundred) but also for his continuous input to the theory of urbanism, including texts and proposals. It is precisely…

By Ben Dooley, New York Times article Donald Keene, whose translations of Japanese literature into English and prodigious academic output helped define the study of the subject and made him a celebrity in Japan, died on Sunday in Tokyo. He was 96. The Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University confirmed his death….

At age 91, artist Toshiko Okanoue is very much in the spotlight. An influential publisher just released a book of her photo collages and her largest-ever retrospective at a public museum is now showing in Tokyo. But it hasn’t always been this way. After a brief but successful career in the 1950s, Okanoue and her…

NHK World Video  

Text and Photos by Alice Gordenker Masao Nagata of Nagata Indigo Dyeing Works (長田染工場) in Izumo, Shimane demonstrates their hands-on dyeing process done just as in the olden days before mechanization. First, he moistens the cloth before lowering it into a high-alkaline dye bath of fermented indigo and lye. Indigo appears green when lifted from…

During an artist’s residency that I had in Venice in 2015, I went to see Sugimoto’s Glass Tea House Mondrian and took these photos. This temporary pavilion project at Le Stanze del Vetro, San Giorgio Maggiore… was one of the off site installations that were part of that year’s Venice Bienale. It was intriguing that…

節分 setsu (season) + bun (break) Setsubun is literally a break between seasons and occurs several times during the year. But the setsubun that is noted on calendars today in Japan is on February 3. In China and many other places in Asia it corresponds to the start of the lunar New Year. In Japan…

A 26-minute video celebrating a project of the late Shiro Kuramata, one of the great designers of the 20th century (1960’s thru 1980’s). He played a central role in Japanese architecture and design as it was becoming especially prominent, internationally. Kuramata may be best known for creating some of the world’s most iconic furniture. This…

by Bianca Bosker from New York Times article, April 3, 2017 WITHOUT WARNING, the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto begins to sing. Moments before, he had been guiding me through his minimalist penthouse loft in a verdant neighborhood of Tokyo, explaining in a voice barely louder than a whisper why white Japanese shikkui plaster is the…