More about »Kazuo Shinohara: The Umbrella House Project«
The wooden house’s post-and-beam construction references traditional Japanese domesticand temple architecture.Experts from Japan and Europe supervised thedismantling of the house in Tokyo and its reassembly in Weil am Rhein.
The book traces the long journey of the Umbrella House in lavishillustrations including impressions from 1960s Japan, architectural designs andplans, and photographs that document its dismantling and reassembly or show thehouse in its new location. Texts by Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA), Shin-ichi Okuyama,and David B. Stewart discuss the Umbrella House against the background ofJapanese architectural discourse between 1960 and the present.
»The strength of my conviction that ›A Houseis a Work of Art‹ was born of the struggle with this smallhouse. I wished to express the force of space contained in the doma [earthen-floorroom] of an old Japanese farmhouse, this time by means of the geometricstructural design of a karakasa [oiled-paper Japanese umbrella].« Kazuo Shinohara in a text on the Umbrella House published in October1962 in the Japanese architecture journal Shinkenchiku (vol. 37, no. 10;first published in English in February 1963 in The Japan Architect, vol.38, no. 2).
