Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994), the celebrated Italian architectural historian, published L’architettura moderna in Giappone in 1964, offering a rare outsider’s view of the metabolist architecture of Kenzo Tange and Kunio Maekawa among others. The text has recently been made available in English for the first time in a new publication edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and featuring accompanying essays by contemporary contributors, published by MACK. In this event Mostafavi and a group of guest panellists discuss Tafuri’s provocative and idiosyncratic text and the important moment in Japanese architecture with which it engages.
Speakers
Mohsen Mostafavi, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design
Luisa Lorenza Corna, art and design historian, currently Leverhulme Fellow at Birkbeck University in London
Yasufumi Nakamori, Tate Modern's senior curator of international art, and writer on post-1945 Japanese art and architecture
Shin Egashira, architect, educator and director of Koshirakura Landscape Workshop
Monday 22 May
19:00 BST
Frobisher Auditorium 1
Barbican Centre
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS
Tickets £15 / £12 / £5
Available here
Image: Kunio Maekawa, Kyoto Civic Center. From Kunio Maekawa and Matsukuma Hiroshi, Kunio Maekawa Retrospective (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2006).
About Modern Architecture in Japan by Manfredo Tafuri
Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994), the celebrated Italian architectural historian, published L’architettura moderna in Giappone in 1964. At the time, Tafuri was twenty-nine years old and had not visited Japan. His slim volume on the country’s postwar architecture was the first in a series of guidebooks on contemporary architecture under the direction of Leonardo Benevolo. Here, translated into English for the first time, the book presents a rare outsider’s view of the Metabolist movement and figures such as Kenzō Tange by one of the most astute critics of the second part of the twentieth century.
Find out more here.
