FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND JAPAN REVISITED
Traditional Japanese Culture as a Means to Modern American Architecture
By: KEVIN NUTE
Hardcover | 23 December 2024
Although it has long been accepted that America’s most famous modern architect was influenced by traditional Japanese culture, the nature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s creative debt to Japan has remained largely unclear. This book suggests that Japan had a more profound impact on Wright’s approach to design and his notion of organic architecture in particular than had previously been acknowledged. More specifically, it argues that the influence of Ernest Francisco 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 Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913), was pivotal in bringing together what would eventually become Wright’s twin passions of traditional Japanese art and the notion of the organic.
Building on the success of the first edition, which won the 1994 AIA International Monograph Award, this revised and expanded version contains new sections on the Western image of Japan as Other, the question of cultural appropriation, and Wright’s apparent translation of certain 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