An Anatomy of Influence

Book excerpt: Taking inspiration from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, this book elucidates the theory and practice of a selected group of key Japanese architects by situating them within a wider cultural context of art, technology, literature, and politics. Illustrated with rarely seen images and interspersed with previously untranslated texts, the book uses biographical profiles and comparative analyses to trace the evolution of spatial, aesthetic, and behavioral concepts in Japanese architecture over the postwar decades. In particular, the political activism of architects in the 1960s and the social criticism of architects in the 1970s provide a vital source of inspiration for the protean creativity of the Japanese architectural world today.