Kevin Nute 
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND JAPAN REVISITED [EPUB ebook] 
Traditional Japanese Culture as a Means to Modern American Architecture

Although it has long been accepted that America’s most famous architect was influenced by Japanese culture, the nature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s debt to Japan has remained unclear. This book argues that Japan had a more profound impact on Wright’s approach to design, and in particular on his notion of the organic, than has previously been acknowledged. It suggests that the influence of Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), the leading American authority on Japanese art at the turn of the 20th century — who also happened to be the cousin of Wright’s first employer in Chicago, the Shingle Style architect Joseph Silsbee (1848–1913) — was pivotal in bringing together what would become Wright’s twin passions of Japanese art and the organic whole.

Building on the success of the original book, which won the 1994 American Institute of Architects’ International Architectural Monograph Award, this revised and expanded edition contains new sections on the Western image of Japan as other, the question of cultural appropriation, and Wright’s translation of Japanese building forms into his own architectural language.

Contents:

• Foreword


• The Benefits of Distance


• Influences and Inferences


• Japan Interpreted


• The Japanese House Dissected


• Japanese Architecture Comes to Stay in Chicago


• The Organic Nature of Japanese Art


• The Architectural Plan, Picture & Pattern as Line-Ideas


• The Art of Abstraction


• The Art of Life


• Exchanging Gifts in Edo


• The Art of Translation


• The Other as a Reflection of the Self


• Appendices


• Bibliography


• Image Credits


• Index

Readership: Professionals, academics and students of architecture, interior design, art history, Asian studies and cultural studies.

Kevin Nute is a British American architectural theorist and professor of architecture at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. He trained at the universities of Cambridge and Nottingham and spent much of his early career in Japan, initially as a visiting research scholar at the University of Tokyo and later as an associate professor of architecture at Muroran Institute of Technology. His other books include Embodied Time (2024), The Constructed Other (2021), This Here Now (2020), Naturally Animated Architecture (2018), and Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture (2004).