In the second half of the 1960s, between the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and Osaka Expo of 1970, many of Japan’s leading architects pursued architectural concepts that directly corresponded to the progression of urban spaces. In such a context, Kazuo Shinohara put forth his desire for “eternity in space” through two unusual houses, the first in a simple plan with a single straight line running slightly off-center within a 10-meter square, covered by a tiled, pyramidal roof, and the other with its main living space in a skewed plan, with an almost entirely earthen floor that connected to a subterranean bedroom. These two houses, House in White and House of Earth, were named in accordance with the contrasting images of the archetypal space they each embody. Retaining their original forms, House in White and House of Earth were passed onto a new generation of owners in 2009 and 2025 respectively. In fall 2022, an earlier work, Umbrella House was dismantled and resurrected on the campus of Vitra, just outside of Basel, Switzerland. The societal realities of Japan make it difficult for private houses to have long lives, but piece by piece Shinohara’s predication from half a century ago is becoming reality.

Throughout his career Shinohara advanced his creative agenda by posing numerous questions to himself. Among those questions, the idea of eternity grew out of his opposition to Metabolism that sought to incorporate fluctuations over time into the architectural construct, but beyond this antithetical stance, the pursuit of unique and original architectural spaces that permeate and transcend time came to define Shinohara’s lifework.

One of the most significant losses in our modern age of global capitalism is the idea of an architecture that captures the long arc of time. This commemorative exhibition reconsiders the lifework of Kazuo Shinohara who spent his career imprinting this lost idea along the twin axes of words and space.

Shin-ichi Okuyama, Momoyo Kaijima, Seng Kuan