Challenges and Achievements

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of Arts and Architecture

NISEI ARCHITECTS:

CHALLENGES AND ACHIEVEMENTS

A Thesis in

Architecture

Katrin Freude

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Architecture

May 2017

The Thesis of Katrin Freude was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Alexandra Staub Associate Professor of Architecture Thesis Advisor

Denise Costanzo Associate Professor of Architecture Thesis Co-Advisor

Katsuhiko Muramoto Associate Professor of Architecture

Craig Zabel Associate Professor of Art History Head of the Department of Art History

Ute Poerschke Associate Professor of Architecture Director of Graduate Studies

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

Abstract

Japanese-Americans and their culture have been perceived very ambivalently in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century; while they mostly faced discrimination for their ethnicity by the white majority in the United States, there has also been a consistent group of admirers of the Japanese art and architecture. Nisei (Japanese-Americans of the second generation) architects inherited the racial stigma of the Japanese minority but increasingly benefited from the new aesthetic light that was cast, in both pre- and post-war years, on Japanese art and architecture. This thesis aims to clarify how Nisei architects dealt with this ambivalence and how it was mirrored in their professional lives and their built designs.

How did architects, operating in the United States, perceive Japanese architecture? How did these perceptions affect their designs? I aim to clarify these influences through case studies that will include such general issues as (1) Japanese-Americans’ general cultural evolution, (2) architects operating in the United States and their relation to Japanese architecture, and (3) biographies of three Nisei architects: George Nakashima, Minoru Yamasaki, and George Matsumoto. By tracking three professional careers and three different “mindsets” regarding Japanese ancestry, Japanese architecture, and Japan in general, I aim to discover these architects’ design philosophy. Using interviews, images and plans, and other archival materials, I will concentrate primarily on residential case studies. By focusing on single- architect/single-client situations, as well as the architects’ own self-designed dwellings, I aim both to avoid fragmenting the role of “agency” and to refine ideas about the architects’ “design philosophies.” By methodological restriction to 1:1 designer/user situations, and by employing consistent labeling and standardized comparison procedures, I hope to draw conclusions about similarities running across the range of heterogeneous examples.

Western architects readily experimented imported Japanese elements, appreciating their exotic forms and concepts. But, Japanese immigrants had been mostly unable or unwilling to represent their architectural heritage in their built environment; they only gradually developed more confidence to explore their bicultural background. Nisei architects acknowledged their ethnic background selectively, putting a positive spin on their ancestral culture to carve out a niche in the architecture profession without having to face the issue of rejecting or accepting any specific Japanese stereotypes.

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Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... v List of Tables ...... ix Acknowledgments ...... x

CHAPTER 1 Introduction ...... 1 Japanese Immigrants and Japanese-Americans in the United States ...... 2 Nisei Architects and Their Challenge ...... 4

CHAPTER 2 The Historic and Constructed Discourse on Japanese Architecture in the United States ...... 7 Rising Interest in Japanese Architecture...... 9 The Architects and the Interpretation and Influence of Japanese Architecture ...... 13 Ralph Adams Cram ...... 14 Greene & Greene ...... 18 Frank Lloyd Wright ...... 22 Richard Neutra ...... 28 Harwell Hamilton Harris ...... 32 Change in the Perception of Japanese Architecture in the Postwar Era: Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius ...... 37 Double Coding of Japanese Architecture and its Interpretations ...... 40

CHAPTER 3 Nisei Architects ...... 46 The Architects ...... 47 George Nakashima ...... 48 Minoru Yamasaki ...... 53 George Matsumoto ...... 59 The Houses ...... 63 Nakashima Woodwork Shop ...... 64 Yamasaki Residence ...... 77 Matsumoto House ...... 86 Double-Coding and Hybridity in the Nisei Architects’ Designs and Professions...... 91

CHAPTER 4 Conclusion ...... 97

Bibliography ...... 102

Appendix ...... 106

List of Figures

Figure 2.1 Morse, Edward. View of Dwelling from Garden in Tokyo (The Japanese Home and Their Surroundings, 1886, p.55) ...... 9 Figure 2.2 Morse, Edward. Section through Veranda and Guest Room (The Japanese Home and Their Surroundings, 1886, p.126) ...... 11 Figure 2.3 Goodhue, Bertram. Goodhue’s Perspective of His and Cram’s Designs for the Imperial Japanese Parliament Buildings, Tokyo. Drawing, 1898. (Shand-Tucci, Douglass. “Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture.” Vol. 1. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, p.403)...... 14 Figure 2.4 View from the Front (Architectural Record, 1898, p.84) ...... 16 Figure 2.5 Floor Plan, Knapp House (Architectural Record, 1898, p.83) ...... 16 Figure 2.6 From the Garden (Architectural Record, 1898, p.86) ...... 17 Figure 2.7 Exterior: Courtyard; Arturo Bandini House, Paseda, California. Photograph, n.d.( Environmental Design Archives, University of California at Berkeley) ...... 19 Figure 2.8 Exterior: view from north, David Berry Gamble House, Pasadena, California. Photograph, n.d. (Environmental Design Archives, University of California at Berkeley) ...... 19 Figure 2.9 View of south (front) and west elevations], 1904—1905, Mrs. Adelaide M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, California (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Columbia University) ...... 20 Figure 2.10 First floor plan; front elevation; east elevation: No. 2, 1904—1905, Mrs. Adelaide M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, California (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Columbia University) ...... 20 Figure 2.11 Exterior: view from interior courtyard, bridge, Mrs. Adelaide M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, California. Photograph, n.d. (Environmental Design Archives, University of California at Berkeley) ...... 21 Figure 2.12 Living room and raised dining room, Mrs. Adelaine M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, California. Photograph, 1904—1905 (Environmental Design Archives, University of California Berkley) ...... 21 Figure 2.13 Section of the east pagoda of the temple of Yakushi-ji near Nara, ca. 730. (from Nute, Kevin. “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan.” p.149) ...... 24 Figure 2.14 The St Mark’s Tower project, New York City, 1929, section. (from Nute, Kevin. “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan.” p.149) ...... 24 Figure 2.15 Robie's house at 5757 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago (Hoffmann, The Robie House, p.2) ...... 25 Figure 2.16 First (Ground) Floor Plan, (The Robie House, p.2) ...... 25 Figure 2.17 Frank Lloyd Wright. The Great Hall of the Temple of Higashi Hogan-ji Betsuin, Nagoya. Photograph, 1905. (from Nute, Kevin. “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan.” p.145) ...... 26 Figure 2.18 Frank Lloyd Wright. The hovering roof planes of the Frederick C Robie House, Chicago, designed in 1906. Photograph. (from Nute, Kevin. “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan.” p.145) . 26 Figure 2.19 Street View of Dwelling in Tokyo (Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, p.54) ... 27 Figure 2.20 Miller (Grace Lewis) House (Palm Springs, Calif.), 1936—7 (Image © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California) ...... 30 Figure 2.21 Miller (Grace Lewis) House, Floor Plan (in reverted colors, from Stephen Leet, “Richard Neutra’s Miller House,”2004, p.127) ...... 30

Figure 2.22 Living room and covered porch of Miller (Grace Lewis) House (Palm Springs, Calif.), 1936—7 (Image © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California) ...... 31 Figure 2.23 Pool and outside view of covered porch of Miller (Grace Lewis) House (Palm Springs, Calif.), 1936—7 (Image © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California) .... 31 Figure 2.24 Harris, house for Pauline Lowe ad Clive Delbridge, Altadena, California, 1933—34, drawing on linen (Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.43) ...... 33 Figure 2.25 Harris, Lowe plan (Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.43)...... 33 Figure 2.26 Fellowship Park, Photograph by Fred R. Dapprich (Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.63)...... 35 Figure 2.27 Harris, Fellowship Park plan, 1935 (Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.62) ...... 35 Figure 2.28 View of the Harwell Hamilton Harris House (Fellowship Park House). (Photograph, Fred Dapprich. California Arts & Architecture Magazine, March 1937) ...... 36 Figure 2.29 Fellowship Park (Photograph by Fred R. Dapprich), (from Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.63) ...... 36 Figure 3.1 Site plan for Nakashima Woodwork Shop in Aquetong Road, New Hope, PA, 2017. Based on Google maps...... 64 Figure 3.2 Plot Plan, George Nakashima Woodwork Shop ...... 64 Figure 3.3 George Nakashima Woodworker Complex, “George Nakashima Woodworker.” http://www.nakashimawoodworker.com/visit/. Accessed on October 10, 2016...... 65 Figure 3.4 Workshop, looking north-northeast (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014) ...... 67 Figure 3.5 Interior view, Showroom, looking west (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014) ...... 67 Figure 3.6 Conoid Studio, side elevation looking west-northwest (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014) ...... 68 Figure 3.7 Interior view, Conoid Studio, looking southeast (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014) ...... 68 Figure 3.8 Arts Building viewed from the Cloister, looking north (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014) ...... 69 Figure 3.9 [Mira Nakashima’s] House and the Guest House, 1970 (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.222) ...... 69 Figure 3.10 George Nakashima House, looking southeast, (© James Rosenthal, HABS, 2012 from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014) ...... 70 Figure 3.11 Floor plan, George Nakashima House ...... 70 Figure 3.12 The living room, ca. 1960 (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.55) ...... 71 Figure 3.13 George Nakashima, his wife and daughter in the kitchen (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.54) ...... 72

Figure 3.14 The bathroom, ca. 1950 (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.54) ...... 72 Figure 3.15 Reception House, looking west (© James Rosenthal, HABS, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014) ...... 73 Figure 3.16 Floor Plan, Reception House ...... 73 Figure 3.17 Reception House, Entrance area (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.27) ...... 74 Figure 3.18 Reception House, Living area (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.226) ...... 76 Figure 3.19 Reception House, Tearoom (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.28) ...... 76 Figure 3.20 Yamasaki's house in Troy, before refurbishment (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) ...... 77 Figure 3.21 Yamasaki's house in Troy, 1958 (Erza Stoller © Esto) ...... 77 Figure 3.22 Yamasaki's house in Troy, interior, living area, 1958 (Erza Stoller © Esto) ...... 78 Figure 3.23 Site plan of Yamasaki Residence, 2016, based on Google Maps...... 79 Figure 3.24 Plot Plan of Yamasaki Residence ...... 79 Figure 3.25 View of entry courtyard from Yallop, Rob, and Todd Walsh. “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, Minoru and Teruko Hirashiki, House.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Ann Arbor, MI: Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture / MI SHPO, April 2013. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13000905.pdf, p.24) ...... 80 Figure 3.26 Upper Floor plan, Yamasaki Residence ...... 80 Figure 3.27 View of entry foyer (from Yallop, Rob, and Todd Walsh. “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, Minoru and Teruko Hirashiki, House.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Ann Arbor, MI: Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture / MI SHPO, April 2013. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13000905.pdf, p.33) ...... 81 Figure 3.28 View of dining room, facing living room (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) ...... 81 Figure 3.29 View of living room, facing fireplace (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) ...... 82 Figure 3.30 View of living room, facing backyard (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) ...... 82 Figure 3.31 View of front door and courtyard before remodeling (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) ...... 83 Figure 3.32 View of front door looking northeast (from Yallop, Rob, and Todd Walsh. “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, Minoru and Teruko Hirashiki, House.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Ann Arbor, MI: Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture / MI SHPO, April 2013. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13000905.pdf, p.26) ...... 83 Figure 3.33 Mies van der Rohe, Lemke House, View from Garden (from Krohn, Carsten. Mies van der Rohe: the built work. 2014, p.97) ...... 84 Figure 3.34 Site plan for Matsumoto House in Runnymede Road, Raleigh, 2016. Based on Google maps...... 86 Figure 3.35 Plot Plan of Matsumoto House ...... 86

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Figure 3.36 Matsumoto Residence – Entrance at night (from “George Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Triangle Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist Masters Gallery, September 15, 2016) ...... 87 Figure 3.37 Upper Floor plan, Matsumoto House ...... 87 Figure 3.38 View of living room, facing west (from “George Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Triangle Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist Masters Gallery, September 15, 2016) ...... 88 Figure 3.39 View of Porch (from “George Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Triangle Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist Masters Gallery, September 15, 2016) ...... 89 Figure 3.40 View of East façade (from “George Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Triangle Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist Masters Gallery, September 15, 2016) ...... 89 Figure 0.1 George Nakashima House--Floor Plan ...... 106 Figure 0.2 Reception House--Floor Plan ...... 106 Figure 0.3 Kimmerly, David. George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop, Buck County, PA, Floor Plan Reception House. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/weekly_features/NakashimaHouse- Studio.pdf Accessed October 24 2017. National Register of Historic Places: Nakashima George House, Studio and Workshop. November 2007...... 107 Figure 0.4 Kimmerly, David. George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop, Buck County, PA, Floor Plan George Nakashima House. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/weekly_features/NakashimaHouse-Studio.pdf Accessed October 24 2017. National Register of Historic Places: Nakashima George House, Studio and Workshop. November 2007...... 107 Figure 0.5 Yamasaki Residence--First Floor Plan ...... 108 Figure 0.6 Yamasaki Residence--Basement Plan ...... 109 Figure 0.7 Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Minoru Yamasaki—First Floor Plan, provided by Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University ...... 110 Figure 0.8 Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Minoru Yamasaki--Basement Plan, provided by Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University ...... 110 Figure 0.9 Matsumoto House--First Floor Plan ...... 111 Figure 0.10 Matsumoto House--Basement Plan ...... 111 Figure 0.11 Matsumoto George, “Matsumoto Residence—First Floor Plan and Details,” George Matsumoto Papers, 1945-1991 (MC00042), Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries; https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00042-005-ff0013-000-001_0003, Accessed January 16, 2017; "NCSU Libraries’ Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Materials" ...... 112 Figure 0.12 Matsumoto George, “Matsumoto Residence—Basement and Foundation Plan,” George Matsumoto Papers, 1945-1991 (MC00042), Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries; https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00042-005-ff0013-000-001_0004, Accessed January 16, 2017; "NCSU Libraries’ Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Materials" ...... 113

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Architectural Elements of the Knapp House and its Pavilion ...... 16 Table 2.2 Architectural Elements of the Tichenor House ...... 20 Table 2.3 Architectural Elements of the Robie House ...... 25 Table 2.4 Architectural Elements of the Miller House ...... 30 Table 2.5 Architectural Elements of the Fellowship Park House ...... 35 Table 3.1 Architectural Elements of the George Nakashima House ...... 70 Table 3.2 Architectural Elements of the Reception House ...... 73 Table 3.3 Architectural Elements of the Minoru Yamasaki Residence ...... 80 Table 3.4 Architectural Elements of the George Matsumoto House ...... 87

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Alexandra Staub and co-advisor Denise Costanzo for their continuous support and guidance in my thesis. Throughout my research, they have been particularly supportive and patient and my thesis would not have been possible without them. I also like to sincerely thank my committee members Katsuhiko Muramoto and Craig Zabel in shaping my thesis with constructive criticism and nudges in the right direction. I am extremely grateful for having such inspirational professors and mentors to help me along the way. I would also like to thank Don Kunze for his patient and inspirational editing. Thanks to Mitzi, and thanks to my family and my friends; I would not have been here without their loving support.

Additionally, I would like to thank Ryan Yokota from the library and archives of the Japanese American Society Committee in Chicago, Elizabeth Clemens and Kristen Chinery from the Walter P. Reuther Library of the Wayne State University and the librarians from the Pennsylvania State University.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

“It was a great experience to savor the life of my forebears after having spent my youth in America. The sensitive environment, the expressive language, the excellence of architecture and crafts, the traditions and the personal relationships—all touch me to the depths of my being.”1 (George Nakashima)

“Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe. And we are told that it's a great influence for modern architecture. If you examine this, I think that you will find that it's the mechanics of Japanese architecture that have been thought of as the direct influence upon our architecture.”2 (Minoru Yamasaki)

“I hate the idea of Japan and US going to war at each other. It’s like mother and dad fighting. Who do you go with? You love them both.”3 (George Matsumoto)

Nisei architects appeared to be at ease with both their Japanese ethnicity and its cultural heritage, but we cannot take this for granted. Nisei architect’s advantage in connecting Japanese architecture to their own professional careers—and assimilating its legacy to ideas of contemporary architecture as a whole—seemed natural at first, but its history painted a different picture.

“Nisei” is the Japanese term designating the second generation of Japanese-American in the

United States, children of “Issei,” or first generation. In a situation of ongoing immigration, the term can be misleading, but in general it frames the situation of the majority of Japanese-Americans born in a particular time-frame, i.e. before the Second World War.4

Nisei architects were “caught in the middle,” pressured to decide how to position themselves in relation to their cultural heritage. While they had the opportunity to follow the lead of many immigrant second generations and reject the “burden” of ethnic inheritance as stigmatized, the Nisei enjoyed a greater agency thank to the new relations between the United States and Japan in the postwar years.

New economic and political relations opened up opportunities that benefited Japanese-Americans generally, and Nisei architects specifically. Along with the growing reputations of modernist architects from the 1930 on, Japanese art and architecture was able to continue benefiting from the positive views

1 given to it by Western scholars, architects, and artists. However, this appreciation was set against the general stereotyping and intolerance that Japanese-Americans experienced broadly and racially.

Japanese Immigrants and Japanese-Americans in the United States

In order to clarify the discrepancy of the perception of the Japanese heritage of Japanese-Americans, I will briefly explain the overall development of the situation that Japanese immigrants and Japanese-

Americans encountered in the United States, as within the years Japanese-Americans were confronted with the question of belonging due to their bicultural heritage.

The main Japanese immigration to the United States occurred from the late 1880s to the middle of the 1920s, showcasing a steady increase of the Japanese population on the U.S. mainland from barely

2,000 to roughly 100,000 people.5 One event in particular initiated the process: The Chinese Exclusion

Act6 of 1886 expelled all Chinese immigrant workers and left a void of labor positions which Japanese immigrant workers were able to fill. As Japanese not only “inherited” the work of the Chinese immigrants, but also the racial stigma, they were forced into economical niches eventually, especially after they tried advance their economic standing and opened their own businesses in the United States.7

The discrimination was legal as well as social. California, for example, where the predominant part of the Japanese immigrants settled, established laws starting from 1913 in order to limit the agency of Japanese immigrants, and subsequently also to hinder their economic and social progress.8 These laws limited the access to land and land ownership, followed by neighboring states establishing their own land laws starting from 1913 and as late as 1943.9 This legal process also reached beyond the jurisdiction of the federal states, when the government of the United States released different national laws concerning immigration policies, such as the “Gentleman’s Agreement” between Japan and the

U.S. (1908) that intended to reduce the immigration of Japanese laborers, and the Immigration Law of

1924 that put a lid on the number of immigrants per nation.10

With the mounting tension between Japan and the United States during the Second World War and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, legalized discrimination reached its peak, as roughly 120,000 people with Japanese ancestry were moved from the West Coast into internment camps. The move was justified as a matter of self-defense of the United States fearing a Japanese invasion from the West. It was executed without proof of disobedience or sabotage by the Japanese-American population and caused a collective trauma that unceremoniously reminded Japanese-Americans of their bicultural background and fueled the question of identity and belonging.11

After the Second World War ended and the internment camps were dissolved, Japanese-

Americans resettled and tried to gain back their life in the American society. Having oftentimes lost the majority of their possessions due to the internment, they were forced to start all over again, reestablishing businesses, homes and institutions. Racial discrimination did not end with the war, so an overall uncertainty and hesitancy towards their cultural roots and the reestablishment of their identity within the U.S. American context complicated their situation. Despite the devastation the internment caused, it surprisingly also opened up opportunities for Nisei to break out of the previous hierarchy in the families or communities and out of the labor-dominated work, and gain an independence that most likely would not have been possible within the previously fixed social structures inside and outside their ethnic enclaves. The insistence of their Issei parents to gain a proper education and the demand of qualified jobs in the internment camps gave Nisei the experience and confidence to succeed in and after the resettlement period.12 Eventually, the improvement of the relation between the United States and

Japan in the 1950s and 1960s was mirrored in the Japanese-American population as well, as they were not considered an enemy alien anymore and were able to slowly express their ethnic background more comfortably.

In his book on Japanese-Americans (1976), Harry Kitano described the improving situation of increased professional work opportunities available to the Japanese-Americans. He twice cited the

3 prominence that Nisei were beginning to experience in the architecture profession.13 This observation was possibly inspired by Minoru Yamasaki’s recently finished World Trade Center in New York (1973), or

Gyo Obata’s co-founding of the internationally prominent firm HOK.

Nisei Architects and Their Challenge

Mainstream American culture did not readily accept Japanese cultural heritage, and for many decades

Japanese-Americans hesitated to claim or proclaim that heritage. In the prewar years, architectural expressions of this heritage were rare. Interiors, shielded from the eyes of non-Japanese neighbors, ethic expressions such as specialized baths or shrines were more confidently and commonly maintained.

Buddhist churches, which openly proclaimed their origins in style and detailing, were the exception. But, even in protected enclaves such as “Japantowns,” there were few other indicators of Japanese cultural presence in the American landscape.14

Postwar years did not evidence much new cultural visibility. Housing posed a main source of discrimination in the immediate post-internment years, worsened by an overall shortage in housing, even though the discrimination had considerably lessened compared to the prewar years.15 Yet,

Japanese-Americans achieved greater domestic comfort in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to the social and political developments. New ethnic centers, such as the Japanese Center in San Francisco (1968), reflected these improvement at home, combined with a more symbolic strengthening of the bond between Japan and the United States.16

Nisei architects found themselves in the midst of this uncertainty. Their early life spent in an unaccepting environment, they found little in their built surroudings to instruct them about the

Japanese aesthetic. Their contacts with Japanese architecture were most often limited to trips to visit relatives in Japan. In this constellation of alienation from both inside and outside, they approached the

Japanese enviroment as outsiders, as if they were Westerners without Japanese roots taking an

“academic” interest in Japan. The twentieth century’s positive reception of the Japanese aesthetic in architecture was a jarring contrast to the social experienes of actual Japanese-Americans “alienated from both sides” in the United States. This contrast was responsible for the way the three architects in this study, George Nakashima (1905—1990), Minoru Yamasaki (1912—1986) and George Matsumoto

(1922—2016), perceived their ambiguous relations to U.S. culture and for how they developed their design philosophies and professional lives. There is an underlying gesture of gaining agency through their ethnicity that, in equal parts, derived from an inner and local necessity as well as outside pressure.

While Nisei architects might have enjoyed generally new freedom beginning with the postwar era, they still risked being bound and judged based on their cultural heritage. Such was the two-sided coin, the advantages and disadvantages for Nisei architects, whose professional and personal lives were to be consistently and radically ambivalent.

Endnotes

1 George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections, 1st ed (Tokyo ; New York: Kodansha International, 1981), 59. 2 Minoru Yamasaki, Minoru Yamasaki interview: Oral Histories, interview by Virginia Harriman, August 1959, Research Collections, Smithsonian Institute, Archive of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/minoru-yamasaki-interview-6235#transcript. 3 George Matsumoto, Japanese American Incarceration / WWII American Home Front Oral History Project, interview by David Dunham and Candice Fukumoto, Transcript, 2015, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkley, http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/matsumoto_george_2015.pdf. 4 Harry H. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, 2. ed, Prentice-Hall Ethnic Groups in American Life Series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 5. 5 Ibid., 210–1. 6 “The Chinese Exclusion Act was an immigration policy passed on May 6, 1882, by the U.S. Congress that suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States. The first U.S. immigration act to explicitly exclude a specific ethnic group, the policy targeted Chinese laborers, skilled and unskilled, who up the overwhelming bulk of Chinese immigrants. The entry of merchants, students, diplomats, and tourists was not suspended. However, the 1882 act made all Chinese immigrants, regardless of the category under which they entered, ineligible for naturalization, the process of becoming a legal citizen of another country.” Nopper, Tamara K. "Chinese Exclusion Act." Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Kathleen R. Arnold, vol. 1, Greenwood, 2011, pp. 105-6. ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w& u=psucic&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CCX2531700048&sid=summon&asid=049e96fef20b1f7f669cce27c0593b32. Accessed 25 Nov. 2016. 7 Kitano, Japanese Americans, 30.

8 Jean Pajus, The Real Japanese California, 1971st ed. (Berkley, California: James J. Gillick Co., Incorporated, 1937), 49–50, 100–1. 9 cf. Eric Walz, “From Kumamoto to Idaho: The Influence of Japanese Immigrants on the Agricultural Development of the Interior West,” Agricultural History 74, no. 2 (2000): 416. 10 Kitano, Japanese Americans, 30. 11 Ibid., 34–5. 12 Ibid., 89–91. 13 Nisei architects also already mentioned in first ed. from 1969, ibid., 91, 103–4. 14 cf. Gail Lee Dubrow, “Deru Kugi Wa Utareru or the Nail That Sticks Up Gets Hit: The Architecture of Japanese American Identity, 1885-1942,” Locke Science Publishing Company, Inc., Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 19, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 319–33; cf. Gail Lee Dubrow and Donna Graves, Sento at Sixth and Main: Preserving Landmarks of Japanese American Heritage, Rev. 2004 ed (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Books, 2004). 15 Harry H. Kitano, “Housing of Japanese-Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area,” in Studies in Housing & Minority Groups, Publications of the Commission on Race and Housing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 190–2, http://www.heinonline.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.beal/stuhous0001&id=1&collection =beal&index=beal#. 16 Oda Meredith, “Rebuilding Japantown: Japanese Americans in Transpacific San Francisco during the Cold War,” University of California Press Journals, Pacific Historical Review, 83, no. 1 (February 2014): 76.

CHAPTER 2 The Historic and Constructed Discourse on Japanese Architecture in the

United States

Americans readily embraced Japanese architecture, while at the same time they held Japanese immigrants and their culture at a distance. For over a century, Japanese architecture had been subject of numerous studies in the United States. The valuable elements of Japanese architecture were often consistently inconsistent as they depended on the background and understanding of the audience. This resulted in an ambiguity not only in observation, but also in the interpretation of built examples.

From the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, interest in Japanese architecture was fueled by books, newspaper articles, and actual exhibitions of cultural objects, art, dress, and sometimes whole buildings. These artifacts were highly selective and almost always romanticized. What virtual travel gained in security it lost in accuracy. And, as with so many actual

Western trips to actual Eastern lands, virtual pleasures were laced with disapproval and misapprehension. Souvenirs and trophies of travel, journals and books, and exhibitions a short train-ride away domesticated this distrust by shrinking it to the scale of what could be enjoyed in one’s own familiar surroundings.

Much of the public’s exotic curiosity was generated and directed by architects attracted to

Japanese culture, many of whom investigate Japanese architecture directly. They would find formal ideas and directly quote from Japanese style as well blend new and established ideas into a joint structure, or eventually extract abstract concepts from their source.

This chapter aims to clarify the positive reception of Japanese art and architecture, its inclusion in the United States and examples of built work. It explains which part of Japanese architecture was seen as noteworthy by whom and how they have implemented those parts in their design. I find that there was no clear consistency in the reception or adaptation of different building elements. I will discuss the possibility of multiple origins of the design, if illuminated from a certain perspective. For this

7 purpose, this chapter is deeply informed by Clay Lancaster’s book Japanese Influence in America (1963) which documents documented Japanese traits, concepts, and details—among others things— reappearing in the American architectural context.

Rising Interest in Japanese Architecture

In 1876, the Japanese exhibit at the Centennial exposition in Philadelphia acted as catalyst to the

“Japanese craze” that transformed an initial tentative admiration for Japanese art and architecture into a widespread curiosity needing to be fed not just by Japanese products but also by publication describing Japan, Japanese style, and culture. But, these focused on historic events and each author’s experience, generally ignoring architecture.1

Edward Morse (1838—1925) was an exception. His in-depth picture of the Japanese dwelling,

Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886), allowed the public to see what had been missing in its

“rage for all things Japanese.” As a hired professor for zoology at the newly formed Imperial University in Tokyo with no formal education in the architectural field, he developed an interest in the Japanese dwelling and collected his findings in his book. His work stayed true to its name by including all aspects of the house—its features, its usage and culture, its construction, surroundings, shortcomings and

Figure 2.1 Morse, Edward. View of Dwelling from Garden in Tokyo (The Japanese Home and Their Surroundings, 1886, p.55)

9 advantages in comparison to their Western counterparts, not shying away from long descriptions to make the subject understandable to its Western audience. Being aware of the challenge to include all housing types, his main focus stayed on middle class houses while including examples from both the poorer and richer classes on several occasions for comparison.2

He did not sugarcoat his view, starting with the description as following: “The first sight of a

Japanese house,—that is a house of the people,—is certainly disappointing.”3 He continued: “There is no object in Japan that seems to excite more diverse and adverse criticism among foreigners than does the

Japanese house; it is a constant source for perplexity and annoyance to most of them.”4

The general Western dislike for these houses seemed to stem from their biased views, as Morse tried to explain, accusing critics of failing to hold European and American cities to the same standard.

Western eyes viewed with disdain the fragility of the structure, of the jarring contrast with Western norms (structural or aesthetical), the lack of proper protection from the climate (especially the cold) and even issues of the limited privacy of the structure, noise and odor to travel throughout the house. While acknowledging its discomfort and shortcomings, Morse admitted his definitive admiration for several aspects of the Japanese house. He did not merely justify the way of Japanese houses but tried to understand the intention behind its structure, emphasizing the Japanese point of view, built into their distinctive methods and styles of construction.5 He cited the superiority of Japanese carpenters whose technique afforded adaptability to new or unfamiliar designs. He explained that the introverted plans, barren when viewed from outside, actually preserve an aesthetic of privacy within.6

Morse admired the Japanese house despite its limitations when viewed in terms of Western preferences, expectations, and building customs. Although he dismissed any idea that the Japanese house could be imported to the West, either as a practical model or style influence, his quite admiration sought to replace the prejudice of those who would tend to “call all else but themselves and their own ways heathen and barbarous.”7 Clearly, the Japanese house structure could not stand up to Western

10 requirements for security or insulation from the elements. But, Morse’s guarded admiration would fuel a different project of adaptation. His writings would become a guideline and a source of inspiration for many architects to follow, actively feeding onto the “Japanese Craze” that he had proclaimed in his book’s introduction before. While Morse remained mostly calm and sober in his description and tried to represent the Japan that he had seen with his own eyes, he was one of the few who appeared to go to

Japan without a fixed agenda to find and see a certain truth in the architecture.

Figure 2.2 Morse, Edward. Section through Veranda and Guest Room (The Japanese Home and Their Surroundings, 1886, p.126)

Morse was not the only author who validated the Japanese architecture in the Western world.

Two British architect-writers, Banister Fletcher (1833—1899) and his son Banister F. Fletcher (1866—

1953) included Japanese architecture in their widely accepted standard reference work A History of

Architecture on the Comparative Method for Students, Craftsmen, and Amateurs as early as 1901, after they expanded their Eurocentric first edition of 1896 to include “non-historical styles” outside of Europe.

At first, they grouped Japanese architecture together with Chinese architecture—probably due to a visual similarity from an outsider’s point of view. They clearly distinguished the two regions in their critiques, however, and in the major revision of their work in 1921, Japanese architecture earned its own chapter. The Fletchers cited Morse as the primary authority on Japanese architecture, alongside Josiah

Conder (1852—1920)—a British architect and first professor of architecture in Tokyo in 1876. Fletcher subsequently extended his range of sources, including other scholars and architects such as Ralph

Adams Cram.8

In comparison to Morse, the Fletchers remained as objective as they were able to, refraining from inserting a personal opinion on the structure and using a neutral tone throughout their explanations. What they still managed to convey by placing Japanese architecture in their reference work, which can be considered as canonical basis in the architecture discourse in the West, was its significance compared to other non-European regional styles that did not earn a spot in their list, elevating its importance and contributing to informing a wider audience.

While Morse’s and the Fletchers’ treatments gave a primarily theoretical, unified account of

Japanese architecture, individual architects would add their own individual and often contradictory views. From the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, the critical distance separating Japan from the West would shrink, while opinions and borrowings would diversify and complicate the monolithic view.

The Architects and the Interpretation and Influence of Japanese Architecture

The architects I have chosen to discuss are not solely known for their connections with and interests in

Japanese design. In almost all cases, they had already developed their distinctive aesthetic before their conscious consideration of Japanese design.

As noted above, Edward Morse was the first popular author to document Japanese dwellings in explicit detail. His studies would be the starting point for architects for decades to follow. Among the first of these was the Beaux-arts architect Ralph Adams Cram, Charles and Henry Greene, leaders in the

Arts and Crafts movement, and Harwell Hamilton Harris whose focus leaned towards a conceptual approach. Frank Lloyd Wright’s role was more controversial. His repeated incorporation of Japanese styles and motifs in his projects and writings made him into something of an advocate for Japanese aesthetics in the new American context. He must be considered as a representative of both the enthusiasm as well as the ambiguities and contradictions of this cultural exchange. Furthermore, there are also the architects who were influenced by Japan through its affinities with modernism and the theory of minimalist design: Richard Neutra, Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius.

Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram (1863—1942) was probably one of the first American architects to design a distinctly

Japan-inspired dwelling in the United States. His friend Arthur Knapp, a Unitarian minister with an appreciation for Japanese architecture who had already lived in Japan, commissioned Cram to build a house for him to display his collection of Japanese pieces of art and decor.9 At that time, Cram had not been to Japan and may have taken his inspiration for the Knapp House from Morse’s 1890s drawings.

Through Arthur Knapp’s influence, Cram was invited to Japan to propose a design for the new

Japanese Parliament Building in Tokyo with Bertram Goodhue—a close friend and professional partner of Cram. Cram’s co-design remained a more literal and romanticized adaptation of Japanese architectural elements: big swinging rooftops, castle-like structures set inside a walled complex, stone- lanterns and stone walls that seem to imitate the bases of medieval castles and fortresses. The design was never executed, but Cram was able to use the trip to encounter Japanese architecture first hand.10

Figure 2.3 Goodhue, Bertram. Goodhue’s Perspective of His and Cram’s Designs for the Imperial Japanese Parliament Buildings, Tokyo. Drawing, 1898. (Shand-Tucci, Douglass. “Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture.” Vol. 1. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, p.403)

Cram’s writings exceeded his Japanese-inspired work. In his article “The Religious Architecture of Japan” (1904), Cram openly praised temple structures that had been influenced by Chinese and

Buddhist art and architecture, even going as far as comparing it to Greek architecture—a claim that he repeated later in his “Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts” (1905). In view of this he saw Japanese architecture as “so utterly foreign, so radically different in its genesis, so aloof in its moods and motives from the standards in the West, that for a long time it is a wonder merely, a curiosity, a toy perhaps or a sport of nature, not a serious product of the human mind, a priceless contribution to the history of the world.”11

In contrast, he was unable to find much to appreciate in the Shinto buildings12, going as far as calling them barbarous: “When Buddhism came to Japan, bringing a highly developed style of architecture, it found the racial religion housing itself in huts barbarous in their nature, and differing but slightly from the rough dwellings of the people; walls of posts and planks formed the enclosure, and this was roofed with sloping poles forming a steep gable, and projecting through the heavy thatch in X form.

The ridge was kept in place by traverse logs of unhewn timber, and this was, so far as we know absolutely all.”13 A year later, he even dismissed the great Ise Shrine in as “sufficiently ugly and barbarous”14 as well. His only sympathy was for the torii gate, the entrance gate to shrines consisting of two wooden posts and usually one or two horizontal bars, calling it the ‘one triumph’ in Shinto architecture.15

Knapp House Fall River, MA

Figure 2.4 View from the Front (Architectural Record, 1898, Figure 2.5 Floor Plan, Knapp House (Architectural Record, p.84) 1898, p.83)

Table 2.1 Architectural Elements of the Knapp House and its Pavilion16

Knapp Main House (1894) Knapp House Pavilion (ca. 1895—98) Structure Type post and beam construction, half-timbering post and beam construction Material wood wood Roof hip-and-gable roof, rounded dormer layered hip roof Stories 2 1 Plan Shape rectangular, symmetrical rectangular Space individual rooms open main room with encased outer area Openings hinged windows and doors hinged doors, sliding doors/screens Inside-Out terrace at and a balcony above main façade open towards garden, enclosed porch entrance (engawa) Direction entrance and terrace north-west, garden and open façade south-east Outside manicured garden with stone steps and a small pond Finishes Material Outside wood, white plaster, stone base wood Inside straw-mat flooring, wooden walls, wooden ceiling, paper screens Ornamentation Japanese styled wood carvings, no ornamentation Equipment/Features western amenities, stone fireplace, central niches/built in closets staircase, niches/built in closets

Cram himself considered the Knapp House

an experiment in hybrid combinations of

east-west interests. The floor plan and

amenities were designed in a completely

Western manner with the comfort of the

inhabitants in mind. As Morse had pointed

out, foreigners in Japan had to adjust to the

Figure 2.6 From the Garden (Architectural Record, 1898, p.86) local architecture not without little complaints. Thus, the Japanese elements in this house were mostly of a decorative nature. The rectangular building was symmetrical, includes separated rooms and separated functions, with a wide staircase in the center, fireplaces, and hinged doors and windows. There was an open terrace in front of the north entrance, but the overall connectivity with its surroundings was rather limited. There were paper screens inside, particularly one covering the skylight above the central staircase, but its change in direction (lying down, instead of standing up) was sufficient to make it lose its adaptability to the condition of light. The Knapp house’s overall appeal was somewhat similar to temple architecture, white plaster combined with the red wood frames on the outer walls and topped off with a gable-and-hip roof

(irimoya) that was adapted from the temple structures.

The addition of a pavilion a couple of years later—after Cram had the chance to visit Japan in person—was truer to its Japanese origins. The pavilion was designed as a small summer extension of the main building. Completely built out of wood, it was elevated above ground and equipped with sliding doors and windows that allowed adjustment to the outside conditions of light and weather and a connection to the garden. Cram made no secret of his intention to recreate a Japanese house completely out of context—his client had demanded it—but while his client may have commended him, the climate could not.17

Greene & Greene

The Greene brothers (Charles Sumner Greene, 1868–1957; Henry Mather Greene, 1870–1954) also took

Japanese architecture as inspiration. The brothers grew up in Boston, one of the big hubs of the

“Japanese Craze” where Arthur Knapp, Cram, and other scholars such as Ernest Fenollosa and Edward

Morse were active in publicizing Japanese artifacts and culture. Although there is no evidence that the brothers took part in these promotions, it is highly likely that Boston’s many Japanese exhibitions and specialty shops provided their first taste of Japan.18

Charles Greene had purchased Morse’s The Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, at the same time he was collecting other books on the literature and art of Japan, and the mixture of themes and mediums may have led to his own eclectic combinations. The Japanese pavilion at the Louisiana

Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis of 1904 was likely another influence for the brothers. There are no records of how Charles reacted to the Japanese pavilion, but it had impacted him since the design following the exhibition showed the Greene brothers’ truly “Japonesque house”—the Tichenor house.19

Aware of his Arts and Crafts background, early critics confused Charles Greene’s houses for

Swiss architecture. But, Greene quickly corrected them: “From my own understanding there was nothing Swiss about it—it all started from my interest in Japanese early temple design. I considered that they, in that simple timber work, they were the supreme masters, only shared by the Chinese. I never corrected anyone. I only studied to express the needs of my client—and let people talks they please, but after a year or two, writers spotted the Japanese influence and some people became prejudiced [sic] against it.”20

The Greenes didn’t just copy elements and decor, they creatively assimilated them and inserted them into their architectural vocabulary. They maintained their individual style, the result of a merger of

Arts and Crafts, their experiences in Boston and St. Louis, and their fondness for the architects William

Figure 2.7 Exterior: Courtyard; Arturo Bandini House, Paseda, Figure 2.8 Exterior: view from north, David Berry Gamble California. Photograph, n.d.( Environmental Design Archives, House, Pasadena, California. Photograph, n.d. (Environmental University of California at Berkeley) Design Archives, University of California at Berkeley)

Morris and critic John Ruskin.21 But, just as Frank Lloyd Wright had maintained his individuality through strategic borrowings, the Greenes used Japanese architecture to intensify and redirect their former interests. This adaptation was visible throughout various buildings in various stages. Their first style quotations were modest: the redwood panels in the refurbished dining room of the Culbertson House

(1902) bore Japanese decorations.22 The next year—the same year as Charles purchased Morse’s book— his Bandini House design in Pasadena (a covered gallery along the inner yard of the U-shaped house) could equally have referenced local Spanish styles or Japanese illustrations in Morse’s book. Penciled-in changes in the construction drawings wherein at the base of the gallery’s posts foundation stones were added—a common feature in Japanese structures—tilts the evidence in favor of Japan.23

Future referencing was not as subtle. The Greenes’ houses in Pasadena—such as the Pitcairn

House (1906), the Irwin House (1907), the Gamble House (1907)—let more defined and conceptual

Japanese influences show through. The standard arts-and- crafts workmanship was taken up into a more playful Gesamtkunstwerk. Fusion was also evident in the way the houses grew out of their sites with an

“earthbound horizontality.” Terraces, walkways, stone lanterns, and ponds carried the houses’ asymmetrical combinations of overhanging eves, exposed natural-wood rafters, and mixture of large and small elements out into the landscape.24

Tichenor House Long Beach, CA

Figure 2.9 View of south (front) and west elevations], 1904— Figure 2.10 First floor plan; front elevation; east elevation: No. 1905, Mrs. Adelaide M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, 2, 1904—1905, Mrs. Adelaide M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, California (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library California (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Columbia Columbia University) University)

Table 2.2 Architectural Elements of the Tichenor House25

Mrs. Adelaide M. Tichenor House (1904) Structure Type post and beam construction, half-timbering, no diagonals Material wood Roof hip-and-gable roof, overhang Stories 2 (1-story wings) Plan Shape free form, U-shaped, asymmetric Space continuous rooms, specific functions separated (bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom) Openings hinged doors and windows Inside-Out roof terraces on top of the two wings, balconies Direction entrance at south side (facing ocean, opposite of street) Outside enclosed/fenced in, manicured garden, small bridge with railings over pond Finishes Material Outside wood, clinker-brick in-fills Inside wood Ornamentation stained glass windows, wood carvings Equipment/Features open rafters, pagoda-like teahouse in garden

The Tichenor House shows more direct references of Japanese architecture. It was designed with a gable-and-hip roof (irimoya tile roof), just like the pavilion they had seen at the exposition in St. Louis. A teahouse added to the complex had—short of the name—not much in common with the Japanese teahouse; it was more like a pergola. As Bruce Smith puts it in Greene & Greene: Developing a California

Architecture (2011): “Many of the Japanese design elements the Greenes use early on, as for Mrs.

Tichenor, are imitative: the roof, bridge, and balcony railings.”26 As Smith would point out, the lack of diagonal braces in the wooden frame structure is noteworthy. Otherwise similar to typical English structures, this particular detail directly derives from Japanese timber structures designed to be flexible in the face of seismic activity, and juxtaposed with a clinker-brick infill it gave the façade an original character.

The Tichenor House’s free floor plan could just have easily referenced the Shoin style as the

California casa de rancho form;27 the subtle transitions between rooms (as in the dining area’s elevation by two steps) seems to be more definitively Japanese. It may be impossible to say how conscious these references were—the blending of inside and outside using roof terraces and balconies are equally

“Californian” and “Japanese”—but the end result was the same, whatever the “real source” might have been and with or without conscious intention.

Figure 2.11 Exterior: view from interior courtyard, bridge, Mrs. Figure 2.12 Living room and raised dining room, Mrs. Adelaine Adelaide M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, California. M. Tichenor House, Long Beach, California. Photograph, Photograph, n.d. (Environmental Design Archives, University of 1904—1905 (Environmental Design Archives, University of California at Berkeley) California Berkley)

Frank Lloyd Wright

In contrast to Cram and the Greene brothers, who were rather open about their admiration of Japanese architecture and admitted to have taken references from them, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867—1959) was less willing to admit a direct connection. While some critics seemed to have no trouble connecting

Wright to Japanese sources, Wright himself would only admit to being inspired by Japanese woodblock prints.28 Scholars were quite undecided whether Wright was being disingenuous. Kevin Nute concluded that Wright’s architecture had structural as well as conceptual similarities to Japanese architecture, even though he still managed to create his own unique style.

Wright rebuked his skeptics: Japanese architecture was confirmation, not origin, of his thoughts or designs: “To cut ambiguity short: there never was exterior influence upon my work, either foreign or native, other than that of Lieber Meister [Louis Sullivan], Dankmar Adler and John Roebling, Whitman and Emerson, and the greatest poets worldwide. My work is original not only in fact but in spiritual fiber.

No practice by any European architect to this day has influenced mine in the least. As for the Incas, the

Mayans, even the Japanese – all were to me but splendid confirmation.”29

He would admit eventually that “...strangely enough, I found this ancient Japanese dwelling to be a perfect example of modern standardizing I had myself been working with. The floor mats [...] are all three feet by six feet. The size and shape of all the houses are determined by the mats.”30 He praised its modern aspects: “...I found that Japanese art and architecture really did have organic character. Their art was nearer to the earth and a more indigenous product of native conditions of life and work, therefore more nearly modern as I saw it, than any European civilization alive or dead.”31

The question of influence was thus uncertain. Japanese woodblock prints were certainly one source for understanding Japanese spatiality, but it was also quite certain that during the World Fair in

Chicago in 1893, Wright must have seen the Ho-o-den, a replica of the Japanese Phoenix Pavilion. There were also certain parallels to Edward Morse wherein Wright used terms and phrasing similar to Morse’s

22 to describe his own design. Furthermore, Ernest Fenollosa’s interpretation of Japanese art might as well have an impact on Wright. Fenollosa and Wright were relatively close, and Fenollosa had introduced

Wright to Japanese woodblock prints.32

Other evidence was circumstantial. Lancaster pointed out that Wright’s earlier houses in the late nineteenth century bear a “Japanese picturesqueness in its steep roof and an emphasis upon horizontal lines in the lower part, with irregular boulders set against the base of the walls purely for decorative effect.” He claimed that Wright eventually shifted from this picturesqueness to an architectural character: “They are Japanese in their intimacy with nature, inconspicuous entrances, and asymmetrical massing, as well as in the plastered terrace walls with wood copings, slender timber bands in stucco on the vertical planes of the houses, and reduplication of deep obtuse gables, which are thin and thrust outward at the peak as in some Shinto shrines, a type known in Japan as kirizuma.” According to

Lancaster, even the muted colors and the general layout bore resemblance to Japanese architecture and houses, and after Wright visited Japan, he also openly praised the elimination of the insignificant in the houses, achieving grace and purity.33

Whatever the facts of the case, Wright’s view of Japan was romanticized by the prism of the woodblock prints. Before he even set foot in Europe—still been considered obligatory travel for any architectural student—Wright travelled to Japan in 1905, and later again in 1913 and 1916 for the commission on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.34 It is also surprising to see that the result of his design for the Imperial Hotel had barely any connection with Japanese architecture; even his assistant Antonin

Raymond called it simply a monument for Wright himself.35

Yet, Wright seemed to show that Japanese dwellings and architecture confirmed the organic approach he evolved through the 1920s and 1930s. The St. Mark’s Tower project in New York (1929) referred specifically to the pagoda; and the floor plan layout and arrangements of his buildings, such as the Unity Temple (1906) or the S.C. Johnson Administration Building (1936), showed strong affinities to

Japanese design. The St Mark’s Tower in particular had conceptual similarities and abstracted elements that can be related to a Japanese pagoda, first pointed out by Lancaster and repeated by Kevin Nute.36

The tower was supported by a structural core, and the floors alternate between protruding and recessing. The variance of the floors, however, was just suggested in the façade’s materiality; they influenced the inner spatial quality of the tower, instead being grounded in a structural purpose. Thus, the section suggested the connection to a pagoda more than the structural context allowed. In contrast to Wright’s tower, the support in a pagoda was given by its outer wooden structure, the protruding and recessing elements were adjusted to the seismic conditions, while the inner pillar had no load-bearing purpose.

In this context, Wright’s relation to Japanese architecture was still debatable. Wright clearly acknowledged, admired and found confirmation in Japanese art or architecture; without a doubt it was a one and possibly a major source of spatial inspiration.37

Figure 2.13 Section of the east pagoda of the temple of Figure 2.14 The St Mark’s Tower project, New Yakushi-ji near Nara, ca. 730. (from Nute, Kevin. “Frank York City, 1929, section. (from Nute, Kevin. “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan.” p.149) Lloyd Wright and Japan.” p.149)

Robie House Chicago, IL

Figure 2.15 Robie's house at 5757 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago Figure 2.16 First (Ground) Floor Plan, (The Robie House, p.2) (Hoffmann, The Robie House, p.2)

Table 2.3 Architectural Elements of the Robie House38

Frederick C. Robie House (1909) Structure Type masonry construction, framework Material brick, steel, wood, concrete Roof hip roof, very generous and varying overhang Stories 3 Plan Shape free shape, two offset volumes, no overall symmetry but symmetric parts of composition Space open floor plan (connected corridor, living room, dining room), separated rooms (bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen) Openings strong variation of window sizes, hinged doors/windows Inside-Out layering of floorplan, openness of façade and privacy of arrangement Direction drawn back main entrance in the west, hidden service entrance situated in court, facing east; Outside enclosed courtyards, terraces, balconies Finishes Material Outside masonry (red brick), concrete, plaster Inside wood, (glazed) brick, tiles, white plaster Ornamentation wooden carvings (ceiling, doors and windows, wall panels, furniture), murals, stained glass windows, wooden screens/grills Equipment/Features central stone fireplace, multiple bathrooms, service area, integrated garage,

The ambiguity in Wright’s design, its multi-layered-ness and his own exclamation complicated the location of possible influences. Having visited Japan just a couple of years prior to the design of the

Robie House, some parallels can be drawn. The three-storied house was situated at the corner of a block in Chicago, in close proximity to neighboring buildings. By trying to create a generous and open design while still maintaining privacy, Wright layered the floor plan, and placed openings and enclosures strategically. The floor plan was a combination of a free fluid space and private enclosed rooms.

The material of the encasement of the courtyards and garden were the same as the building’s walls, unifying the ensemble into a singular but layered structure. This also enhanced the terrace-like arrangement of the floors of the house that can be traced back to ancient step pyramids39 or as an exaggeratedly stretched Japanese temple or dwelling. This layering would also be connected to the layering of privacy. As Hoffmann has noted those “steps express [...] the stages of privacy,”40 with the most private room being situated the furthest away from the entrance at the top floor, a concept that was quite common in Japanese architecture.

The roof could be another indicator of influence. The generous overhang emphasized the horizontality and, due to the covered areas, created an ambiguous connection between inside and outside. There were also visual similarities to the grand roofs of temples. Hoffmann put it like this:

“Wright exaggerates the horizontal extensions by withdrawing their points of support. Roofs and walls

Figure 2.17 Frank Lloyd Wright. The Great Figure 2.18 Frank Lloyd Wright. The hovering roof planes of the Frederick C Robie Hall of the Temple of Higashi Hogan-ji House, Chicago, designed in 1906. Photograph. (from Nute, Kevin. “Frank Lloyd Betsuin, Nagoya. Photograph, 1905. (from Wright and Japan.” p.145) Nute, Kevin. “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan.” p.145)

26 thus gain an extraordinary independence. When the piers are shifted nearer to the core of the house and the loads are carried by concealed cantilever beams, the nonsupporting walls become sturdy screens, folded to form pylons that stop short of the roofs and often not even below them.”41

The case for influence is far from proved. The materials used in the design—brick, concrete, steel, and white plaster among others—were firmly rooted in the United States and generally traditional

Western architecture, not to Japanese architecture. Wright had certain wooden structures as well, but save for a screen—or ‘grill’—in the entrance area, the joinery did not offer many parallels. The hidden entrance was not common for either Japan or the United States—Wright described his displeasure with the American entrance he dubbed “hole”42 and Japanese entrances were oftentimes emphasized with a roofed gate. Ornamentation, particularly the stained glass windows, could possibly be a reference to

Japanese woodblock prints that Wright admired, but this is conjectural. Wright’s Japanese-ness was more a matter of spiritual affinity than traceable flows of style, elements, or ideas.

Figure 2.19 Street View of Dwelling in Tokyo (Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, p.54)

Richard Neutra

In contrast to the previously discussed architects, Richard Neutra (1892—1970) was not American born architect, but he settled and built in the United States early and contributed to a new awareness of

Japanese architecture. Neutra was a modernist architect from Vienna who had studied under Adolf

Loos, and worked for Erich Mendelssohn and, later, briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright. He eventually established his own business in Los Angeles in 1924.43

He was invited to Japan in 1930 for a lecture tour. His previous publication on U.S. architecture,

Wie baut Amerika (1926) was, to his surprise, well known and read in Japan.44 He wrote down and published his impressions of Japan in a small series of essays in the German magazine Die Form. He initially agreed with his older colleagues about the fragility, lack of insulation of sounds and odors, and small simplicity of Japanese houses and apartment. However, he also recognized that, despite these attributes, the Japanese knew how to arrange themselves around these limitations and acknowledged the limitations as cultural particularity. Neutra also noted that due to the increased use of “Western materials,” concrete, steel and glass, Japanese were rejecting their traditional home designs as inadequate.45 He focused on modern, contemporary buildings that evidenced classic modernism, documenting buildings with flat roofs, white plaster, row windows, and still drawing brief comparisons with Japanese architecture—the horizontality of traditional Japanese buildings, or residential floor plans that still echoed Japanese spatial concepts with openness and fluidity.46 Additionally, Neutra praised the asymmetry in Japanese dwellings and recognized the possibility and advantages of standardization in

Japanese architecture—just as Wright had.47

Returning to the United States, Neutra eventually tried to merge elements and ideas he had collected: “geometric structural forms” and “nature.” The inspiration from Japan showed in buildings like the Edgar Kaufmann residence (Palm Springs, California, 1946) and his Troxell House (Pacific

Palisades, California) from 1957.48 As Barbara Lamprecht pointed out, his interpretation of Japanese

28 design in his houses can be seen in “an overall clarity of composition; immediate and distant visual access to nature that afforded both views and experience of the landscape [...]; physical access to nature through the use of extended terraces, full-height sliding doors (like shoji screens); precise and nuances transitions between indoors and outdoors; and the use of layered, rather than a monolithic approach to materials and methods.”49

Miller House Palm Springs, CA

Figure 2.20 Miller (Grace Lewis) House (Palm Springs, Calif.), Figure 2.21 Miller (Grace Lewis) House, Floor Plan (in 1936—7 (Image © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, reverted colors, from Stephen Leet, “Richard Neutra’s Los Angeles, California) Miller House,”2004, p.127)

Table 2.4 Architectural Elements of the Miller House50

Grace Lewis Miller House (1937) Structure Type framework construction Material wood and steel framework Roof flat roof, overhangs Stories 1 Plan Shape free plan, modularized Space one continuous room (living room, studio) combined with separated rooms (kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) Openings generous sliding screens, sliding as well as hinged doors and windows Inside-Out screened porch; wide glass doors connecting bedroom to outside; wide horizontal windows with low windowsills, Direction entrance and approach from south Outside desert garden (natural appeal but highly stylized), semi-natural flat stones as walkway; grass- covered areas surrounding house; porch and terrace; landscaping by Neutra(128) Finishes Material Outside white painted cement plaster, white painted aluminum elements Inside concrete slab floor, plywood wainscoting on walls, (p115), translucent north glass wall in studio (157), white painted ceiling Ornamentation no ornamentation Equipment/Features integrated garage, fireplace, rectangular pool

Neutra built the Miller House in the newly developing Palm Spring desert area in 1937. He combined the notion of interconnecting the immediate outside with inside while maintaining the distant view.

Generous window opened to the surrounding garden area with deliberately low windowsills to emphasize the horizontality and leave the view outside mostly undisturbed.51

Barbara Lamprecht called the Miller House Neutra’s “most overtly ‘Japanese’ houses”52 and affirms that Neutra’s visits to Japan had left him with a certain ‘essence’ as inspiration.53 The modularization of the façade, the sparse furnishing, the spatial fluidity, the visual and physical interconnection of inside and outside and the “serenity” of the structure can be linked to Japanese design. Comparatively, the structure itself and the details have little resemblance to Japanese design, even though the conceptual and spatial arrangements suggest a direct inspiration.

The garden evidenced Neutra’s understanding of the concept of a Japanese garden. It mimicked the surrounding desert by presenting an almost naturally looking ensemble while being completely manmade. The dry shrubs and cacti were juxtaposed with grass-covered areas surrounding the building, separated by a walkway made out of flat stones which resembles a Japanese So-styled stone path often found in connection with Japanese teahouse architecture (sukiya-style).

Figure 2.22 Living room and covered porch of Miller (Grace Figure 2.23 Pool and outside view of covered porch of Miller Lewis) House (Palm Springs, Calif.), 1936—7 (Image © J. Paul (Grace Lewis) House (Palm Springs, Calif.), 1936—7 (Image Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California) © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California)

Harwell Hamilton Harris

Only a few of Harwell Hamilton Harris’s (1903—1990) buildings directly represent Japanese thoughts and ideas. He had not completed his formal education when he briefly joined Richard Neutra and R.M.

Schindler in their office in Los Angeles, but took evening classes on structural engineering. He eventually opened his own practice in 1933. While Harris had been intrigued by Frank Lloyd Wright’s design, he was also taking in Neutra’s and Schindler’s approach.54 A more direct line to Japan was provided by Harris’s friend Carl Anderson, a furniture designer who had refurbished his own home with Japanese elements.55

Harris was inspired to begin using sliding panels—clear references to the Japanese shoji—using impregnated cotton cloth rather than paper, and matting on the floor. Open rafters, matting and spatial conception were also implemented in some of his other designs. Harris himself said: “I like the clear shapes and clean spaces of the Japanese house. I enjoy its equal concern with indoors and outdoors. I applauded its harmonizing of natural and geometric forms, playing up the superficial similarities [...] My first architectural love, as you know, was Wright’s Hollyhock House. [...] But the Japanese building eschewed mass and made me want to be an architect more than a sculptor.”56

For his Lowe House (Altadena, California, 1934), he explained that Japanese architecture was just part inspiration. It was “influenced first of all by Frank Lloyd Wright’s plan forms, then by Neutra or

Schindler exterior developments … then by Japanese interiors with their simplicity and sliding panels, and matting on the floor.”57 If Harris hadn’t explained the influences, Japanese architecture would have appeared to be more of an indirect casual or unconscious reference. Admittedly, Frank Lloyd Wright and

Richard Neutra, as with many architects studied here, had a built-in natural affinity with Japan, whatever the actual extent of literal influence. The treatment of private and public space, the inner courtyards and the low-hanging roofs marks a closeness to Japan, but as Harris confirmed, these influences ring equally true to Neutra and Wright and the regional architectures of California.

Figure 2.24 Harris, house for Pauline Lowe ad Clive Delbridge, Altadena, Figure 2.25 Harris, Lowe plan (Lisa Germany, California, 1933—34, drawing on linen (Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.43) Harris, p.43)

Another of his project, the Loeb House (Redding, Connecticut, ca. 1944) was designed as basically one continuous room and, according to Lancaster, it was even more Japanese than Harris’s own small home (ca. 1935). Surprisingly, the client, Gerald M. Loeb and his wife, had commissioned

Frank Lloyd Wright beforehand, but that collaboration had not been successful, so they hired Harris instead. Again, Harris used a matted floor, sliding doors in a shoji style and a gable roof, but additionally he also used Japanese niches (toknoma), wooden sliding panels (amado) and a typical box storage (to- bukuro).58

Harris and his wife Jean contributed significantly in the 1940s “re-discovery” of the work of

Greene and Greene and their bungalow style architecture.59 This resulted in not only several publications on the houses of Greene and Greene, but also impacted Harris’s designs in regard to their relations to the site, their uses of wood, and structural rhythms based on the continuity and the conscious interruption of the structure by breaks in the material and surfaces. Thus, Harris incorporated

33 these different Arts and Crafts notions into his buildings as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the total design.60In this regard, by the 1940s, Harris had been influenced by four architects—Greene and Greene, Wright and

Neutra—whose direct contacts with Japanese architecture amplified Harris’s own indirect inclinations.

Fellowship Park House Los Angeles, CA

Figure 2.26 Fellowship Park, Photograph by Fred R. Dapprich Figure 2.27 Harris, Fellowship Park plan, 1935 (Lisa Germany, (Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.63) Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.62)

Table 2.5 Architectural Elements of the Fellowship Park House61

Fellowship Park House (1935) Structure Type post and beam construction Material wood Roof hip roof, overhang Stories 1 Plan Shape rectangular, symmetric, based on grid Space one continuous room, specific functions separated (kitchen, bathroom) Openings hinged doors, sliding windows/screens Inside-Out continuous room completely openable to surroundings on three sides Direction entrance west, access from south Outside situated on hillside, semi-natural pathway to house; property with mostly naturally grown plants Finishes Material Outside wood, bamboo-screens Inside straw-mats for flooring; wooden walls and ceiling, sliding panels Ornamentation no ornamentation Equipment/Features separate kitchen, floor for sitting (no chairs), built in closet, western bathroom

In 1935, Harris had built his own house in the Fellowship Park in Los Angeles, a one-room building that he had reconstructed out of a shed and leftover sliding doors that were initially stored for another project. The house managed to be very close to the minimalistic design and aesthetic of Japanese houses: the elevated wooden post-and-beam structure was almost completely exposed, leaving the wooden rafters open.

The house was integrated in and working with the landscape, its one multi-functional room was completely openable to the nature through the sliding doors on three sides, and the distinct lack of substantial furniture—save for a low table and a bed—encouraged sitting on a grass-matted floor, quite similar to tatami.62 What joined it even closer to the Japanese aesthetic was its minimalism. Again, there were diagonal bracings in the structure, hinged doors and western amenities in kitchen and bathroom that still managed to combine American elements into the building. The hip roof with its overhang was stylistically close to the Japanese as well as the Californian context. The repetition of the sliding panels in the façade could possibly be credited to the necessity and the predetermination of the original shed, but there is a modularity with the structural grid that suggests a similarity to the even spacing of the structural grid of Japanese façade.

Figure 2.28 View of the Harwell Hamilton Harris House (Fellowship Park House). Figure 2.29 Fellowship Park (Photograph (Photograph, Fred Dapprich. California Arts & Architecture Magazine, March by Fred R. Dapprich), (from Lisa Germany, 1937) Harwell Hamilton Harris, p.63)

Change in the Perception of Japanese Architecture in the Postwar Era: Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius

The interest in Japanese design had dimmed due to the conflict between Japan and the United States during the Second World War. By the late 1940s, Harris and his wife had started to reintroduce the work of Greene and Greene and their bungalow style, which subsequently was also connected to Japanese architecture and thus contributed to another wave of appreciation for Japanese design.

Harris did not visit Japan, but other modern architects such as Richard Neutra had the opportunity to do so. But, Neutra was not the only architect. Travels of the influential German modernists, Bruno Taut (1880—1938) and Walter Gropius (1883—1969) further fueled the discussion about Japanese architecture in a new modern context.

In 1933, shortly after Neutra visited Japan, Bruno Taut had been invited to visit, as a distinguished architect. He was shown around many architectural sites. Subsequently, he wrote a series of smaller publications on Japanese architecture that were made available in the United States as well as

Germany, and summarized his findings in a lengthier study Das japanische Haus und sein Leben (The

Japanese House and its life). Taut insisted on living rather than just visiting Japanese houses. He quickly came to realize—just like Morse half a century before him—that the Japanese house presented challenges to the Western occupant. Facilities, sitting, sleeping and living arrangements were quite unusual, as was the chilly temperature in the rooms, and the travel of sound and odor through the thin walls.63 Contrasting Cram’s view of thirty years earlier, Taut admired the Ise Shrine and its naturalness, clarity and simplicity and the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto in its functionality for everyday life, as representation or as philosophical spirituality.64 However, the temples at Nikko, one example of the richly decorated architecture that Cram had admired before, was called—incongruently—“barbarous”65 by Taut, the same terminology that Cram had used for the Shinto architecture he disliked. The inexplicable and capricious shifts of favor spoke more to changes in contemporary Western aesthetics and culture. Taut and Cram, thought different and even opposite in many ways, reflected the volatility

37 of the turn of the century’s critical attitudes, when local uncertainty was unconsciously projected onto foreign subjects. Taut eventually left Japan in 1936 and never got the chance, as did Neutra and the

Greenes, to incorporate Japanese architecture into his own built works.

Another contemporary of Neutra was Walter Gropius. Gropius was a seminal modern architect, co-founder and later director of the Bauhaus in Germany. He had been active in Germany and developing his idea of unifying art and technology, pre-fabrication and mechanization of architecture.

He would leave for the United States in 1937 and became the head of the architecture department at

Harvard (1938—1952), giving him strong leverage in the architecture discussions in the United States.66

Gropius traveled to Japan in the 1950s and shared his experience and thoughts in the essay

“Architecture in Japan,” published in the book Katsura: tradition and creation in Japanese architecture

(1960). Gropius realized in Japan—just like Frank Lloyd Wright had stated in his autobiography of 1938— that the Japanese house was a perfect specimen of modern modularized architecture. Its modularity and moveable wall panels are the “essential features required for a modern prefabricated house.”67

Furthermore the houses “represented a still-living culture which in the past had already found the answer too many of our modern requirements of simplicity, of outdoor-indoor relation, of modular coordination and, at the same time, variety of expression.”68 He continued: “...it contains perfect solutions, already centuries old, for problems which the contemporary Western architect is still wrestling with today: complete flexibility of moveable exterior and interior walls, changeability and multi-use of spaces, modular coordination of all the building parts, and prefabrication.”69

Gropius admitted in seeing the shortcomings of the traditional Japanese house as well, as did

Bruno Taut, but once he turned from an observer to a participant in the life within a Japanese home, he encouraged the Japanese architect to employ new technologies but remain within the “spirit of their own culture.” 70 Like Taut, Gropius contradicted Cram in rejecting the “overbearing profuseness of ornament and decoration [of the temples in Nikko,] which destroys the clarity of the architectural

38 composition as a whole.”71 Here, Gropius admitted that the surface of the temples was misplaced, but the essence harbored the clarity he admired. This essence was not only evident in the Japanese house and subtly in the temples, but particularly in the Ise Shrine and the Katsura Detached Palace as well.

Gropius praised its perfection of details, simplicity and austerity, comparing it to classic European architecture such as Greek architecture. Indeed, Gropius recommended that art and architecture students experience the “sublime, mature solutions of the intricate, ever-new problems of space and human scale, the very media for the art of architecture creation,”72 a statement he compressed into the slogan: “Young architects, forget Rome, go to Japan!”73

Gropius and Taut, and to a lesser extent Neutra, were in the position to leverage modernists who openly positioned themselves towards Japanese architecture and its advantages. But, even Harris and Wright played influential roles in giving new life to material that had been examined before them, not limiting themselves to duplicating Japanese shapes and elements, but putting them in a new conceptual context. Glossing over the picturesqueness of Japanese traditional architecture, they broke down the built tradition to its basic ideas: modularity, horizontal inclination, systematization, simplicity and fluidity of space. Gropius and Taut wrote and lectured about the theory of these elements; Neutra put them into practice in the U. S., where they were even more influential as concrete examples. All five architects used their solid grounding in Western modernism, stretching back to the Arts and Crafts movement in the U. S. and Britain and the Deutsche Werkbund movement in German, to pave the way for an open discourse about Japanese architecture and its new interpretation and connection to modern, contemporary architecture.

Double Coding of Japanese Architecture and its Interpretations

The architects presented here are only a sample of the many American architects who used Japanese architecture as elements and inspiration—derived from contacts with the original or from the interpretations by their colleagues. These architect have been successful, well recognized by their colleagues and by the American population. But, their broad variety of background, architectural teachings, and aesthetic and individual differences argues that an appreciation of Japanese architecture was a centralizing and unifying influence.

How could a foreign tradition so historically distant from the U. S.’s have such an effect, when the reoccurring question throughout its growing adaptation could not be answered: that is, what essentially is Japanese architecture? Based on the sources in the English language that investigated

Japanese architecture at that time, there was far from any consensus about the answer, although there are some common directions in thinking. Each architect’s understanding of the Japanese architecture he/she sought to adopt was heavily guided by their previous teaching and their established thoughts about aesthetics. Without any solid single paradigm, new adopters conceived of multiple kinds of

“Japanese-ness” using different relations, proportions, and seasonings relating three basic categories:

(1) eclectic decorative elements, (2) craftsmanship and structure, and (3) the abstract conceptual ideas of Japanese architecture as an essence. As long as no one had “the right answer,” the different modes of lacking the right answer could exert a positive energy.

(1) Cram, an eclectic architect who had designed churches and buildings in a Gothic style, was easily intrigued by the Buddhist temples, because they manifested subtle consistencies in their details and craftsmanship, as did Gothic counterparts. “[Japanese architecture] is the perfect style in wood, as

Gothic may be called the perfect style in stone.” 74 Thus, Cram focused more on the application of details and decor in the combination with the structure and saw this as Japanese architecture.

(2) Greene and Greene, who came from a background in the Arts and Crafts Movement, admired Japanese architecture’s well-crafted structures. While they started out with playful applications of Japan-ish details, they later concentrated on the cohesion of design and structure, creating a

Gesamtkunstwerk of joinery, crafts and material. Even though they never specifically stated what they considered to be Japanese architecture, their rationale emphasized the superiority of Japanese craftsmanship.

(3) Wright, Neutra and Harris approached Japanese architecture from a more abstract point of view. Wright saw confirmation of his own developed architecture in Japan, praising its organic character as well as the suggestion of standardization in its design. His buildings had structural similarities as well as elements that suggested further stylistic inspirations such as generously overhanging roofs, layering and fluidity of space.

Wright’s “nativist thematic” allowed him to use Japanese-like elements without crediting them directly. Neutra did give audible credit to his interest in Japanese architecture, but he was never explicit about what he considered to be Japanese. Because his ideas were grounded in the interplay of ambiguously defined spaces, views, transitions and materials, Neutra’s affiliations were already unintentionally Japanese. Japanese ideas came naturally to him because of his regional adaptation of the Modernist palette to the California landscape.

Similarly, another Californian, Harwell Hamilton Harris started seeing Japanese architecture in an abstract and diffuse way, recognizing its interconnection and ambiguity between spaces from the inside and outside and the abstraction of the building into natural and geometric forms, bringing the discussion one step further into new situations of the 1930s. Harris followed Wright and Neutra before consciously using simply delaying the “Japanese effect” by one step, adopting what had already been shaped by adoption.

Gropius stressed how important it was for modern architecture students to study Japanese architecture (namely the Katsura detached palace and the Ise shrine) and “forget about Rome,” the birthplace of classic architecture. Gropius and Taut like nearly all architects decades before, were selective when it came to saying what Japanese architecture actually was. Lacking any objective evidence, they would elevate the Ise Shrine to the level of the Parthenon—“structural honesty and lack of ornamentation”—while devaluing temples like the Toshogu Shrine at Nikko, on account of their

“kitsch” excesses. This “over the top” and “not good enough” approach avoided the question of what was actually in the middle.75

Everyone, it seemed, found it easy to admired Japanese craftsmanship and the quality of the joinery—even though no one ever seriously tried to use it in their own designs. They were undecided of the detailing and eventual stylistic execution of the structures, showing a divided view on the temples and shrines. Uncertain about how temples and shrines were actually structured and detailed, most architects stuck to praising the details and craftsmanship as such. As for “conceptual qualities,” these could be joined to Modernism without skipping a beat.

In this context, one can easily conclude that Japanese architecture is not simply a catalogue of details, elements and artifacts. Conceptual relations, deeply rooted in cultural conventions, and non- material aspects have shaped the understanding of architecture that is, unfortunately, easy to miss and hard to understand from an outsider’s point of view. Especially if people approach the Japanese structures with a Western value system, they might—and in part did—struggle to understand some of the complexity and nuances involved. This might lead to dismissing important features too easily as something they have seen before and already hated before giving them the benefit of doubt—as seen in the controversy surrounding Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples.

This ambiguity is not only part of the reception of Japanese design, but also of the design inspired by Japanese architecture. As I mentioned before, comparison to European architecture came

42 naturally because of certain similarities. Trying to find a single common point seems to work only when, as in the case of specific decorative elements, the scale is so small that it becomes insignificant for both traditions. From this point outward, concepts, techniques and the approach to materiality are dosed in a layer of vagueness and multi-applicability so thick that, although the connection to Japanese architecture is there, the connection connects to everything else.

Endnotes

1 Edward Sylvester Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), xxix– xxxiii.

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 6. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Ibid., 10–3. 6 cf. ibid., 35, 50–9. 7 Ibid., 347–8. 8 cf. Banister Fletcher and Banister F. Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for Students, Craftsmen, and Amateurs (London: Batsford, 1896), http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/fletcher1896; cf. Banister Fletcher and Banister F. Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for Students, Craftsmen, and Amateurs, 4th ed. (London: B. T. Batsford, 1901); cf. Banister F. Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for Students, Craftsmen, and Amateurs, 6th ed. (London: B. T. Batsford, Limited, 1921). 9 Clay Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America (New York: Walton H. Rawls, 1963), 70–1. 10 Douglass Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture, vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 403–5. 11 Ralph Adams Cram, “The Religious Architecture of Japan,” Current Literature XXXVI, no. 5 (May 1904): 533; Ralph Adams Cram, Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts (New York, NY: The Baker & Taylor Company, 1905), 136. 12 Derived in part from storehouses and dwellings, Shinto shrines are much more subdued, smaller in scale and modest compared to the temples influenced by Chinese and Buddhist culture. They do show decoration and painted panels, depending on region have unfinished or painted wood structure, and primarily wooden or straw roofs (ceramic tiles are primarily for temples, even though there are a few Shinto structures with tiles). Joseph Cali, John Dougill, and Geoff Ciotti, Shinto Shrines: A Guide to the Sacred Sites of Japan’s Ancient Religion (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013), 38–40. 13 Cram, “The Religious Architecture of Japan,” 533. 14 Cram, Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts, 85–6. 15 Cram, “The Religious Architecture of Japan,” 531–3. 16 cf. Ralph Adams Cram, “An Architectural Experiment,” Architectural Record, 1898, 82–91; Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 70–5; Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram, 1:403–9. 17 cf. Cram, “An Architectural Experiment.” 18 Bruce Smith, Robert Winter, and Alexander Vertikoff, Greene & Greene: Developing a California Architecture, 1st ed (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2011), 89–90. 19 Ibid., 80, 84. 20 Ibid., 80.

21 Ibid., 99; Edward Bosley, Gamble House: Greene and Greene, First publ, Architecture in Detail (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 6–7. 22 Edward R. Bosley et al., eds., Greene & Greene, Repr (London: Phaidon, 2007), 51. 23 Excerpt of Ramona, a story by Helen Hunt Jackson: “low, with a wide veranda on the three sides of the inner court, and a still broader one across the entire front, which looked to the south, these verandas, especially those on the inner court, were supplementary rooms to the house. The greater part of the family life went on in them. Nobody stayed inside the walls except when it was necessary.” According to Gibbs Smith, this can be seen as an inspiration for the verandas along the inner courtyard. Smith, Winter, and Vertikoff, Greene & Greene, 63–4, 80–2; Bosley et al., Greene & Greene, 59; “Greene & Greene Virtual Archives: Browse Project: Arturo Bandini House,” Greene & Greene: Virtual Archives, accessed November 27, 2016, http://www.usc.edu/vh/greeneandgreene/111.html. 24 Bosley et al., Greene & Greene, 95; Bosley, Gamble House, 12. 25 cf. “Mrs. Adelaine M. Tichenor House,” Greene & Greene Virtual Archives, accessed February 19, 2017, https://www.usc.edu/vh/greeneandgreene/261.html; Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 109; Bosley et al., Greene & Greene, 67–9; Smith, Winter, and Vertikoff, Greene & Greene, 85–8. 26 Smith, Winter, and Vertikoff, Greene & Greene, 84–8. 27 “Mrs. Adelaine M. Tichenor House.” 28 Kevin Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan: The Role of Traditional Japanese Art and Architecture in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), 2–5. 29 Quoted in ibid., 4. 30 Ibid., 43. 31 Ibid., 179. 32 Ibid., 53, 178–81. 33 All citations in this paragraph are from Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 85–8. 34 Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 144, 152. 35 David B. Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture: 1868 to the Present, 1st ed (Tokyo ; New York: Kodansha International, 1987), 89, 110. 36 Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 162; Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 149–150. 37 Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 2–5. 38 cf. Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece (New York: Dover Publications, 1984); Historic American Buildings Survey, The Robie House (Palos Park, Ill.: Prairie School Press, 1968). 39 cf. Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, 38. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 40. 42 cf ibid., 44n. 43 Barbara Lamprecht, “From Neutra in Japan, 1930, to His European Audiences and Southern California Work,” Southern California Quarterly 92, no. 3 (October 2010): 219–20, doi:10.2307/41172528. 44 Thomas S. Hines and Richard Joseph Neutra, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, New ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 2005), 93–4; Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 1st ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 25–6. 45 Richard Neutra, “Japanische Wohnung. Abteilung. Schwierigkeiten,” Die Form: Zeitschrift Für Gestaltende Arbeit, 1931, 93–7. 46 cf. Richard Neutra, “Gegenwärtige Bauten in Japan,” Die Form: Zeitschrift Für Gestaltende Arbeit, 1931, 22–28; cf. Richard Neutra, “Neue Architektur in Japan,” Die Form: Zeitschrift Für Gestaltende Arbeit, 1931, 333–40. 47 Lamprecht, “From Neutra in Japan, 1930, to His European Audiences and Southern California Work,” 232. 48 Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 187–8. 49 Lamprecht, “From Neutra in Japan, 1930, to His European Audiences and Southern California Work,” 232. 50 cf. Stephen Leet and Richard Joseph Neutra, Richard Neutra’s Miller House, 1st ed, Primary Material (St. Louis : New York, N.Y: School of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis ; Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); cf. Lamprecht, “From Neutra in Japan, 1930, to His European Audiences and Southern California Work.” 51 Leet and Neutra, Richard Neutra’s Miller House, 109. 52 Lamprecht, “From Neutra in Japan, 1930, to His European Audiences and Southern California Work,” 235. 44

53 Ibid., 237–8. 54 cf. “Harwell Hamilton Harris: An Inventory of His Papers, Photographs and Drawings, 1906-1990,” Texas Archival Resources Online, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin, November 27, 2016, https://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utaaa/00001/aaa-00001.html. 55 Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 43; Harwell Hamilton Harris, Interview of Harwell Hamilton Harris, interview by Judy Stonefield, Tape; Script, 1985, 80, UCLA Library, Center for Oral History Research, http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/viewTextFile.do?itemId=29583&fileSeq=5&xsl=null. 56 Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 45–6. 57 Harris, Interview of Harwell Hamilton Harris. 58 Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 179; Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 115; “Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA (1903-1990),” US Modernist: Masters Gallery, November 27, 2016, http://www.ncmodernist.org/harris.htm. 59 Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 186. 60 Harris, Interview of Harwell Hamilton Harris, 105–6. 61 cf. Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 61–64; cf. Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 179. 62 Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 179; Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 62–4. 63 cf. Chapter 1 of Bruno Taut, Das japanische Haus und sein Leben, Dt. Erstausg., 5.Aufl (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2010), 1–20. 64 Ibid., 143–5, 291. 65 Ibid., 299. 66 “Walter Gropius,” Encyclopedia of World Biography (Detroit: Gale: Gale Virtual Reference Library, 2004), 13–14, ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=psucic&v=2.1&it=r&id=G ALE%7CCX3404702673&sid=summon&asid=3bc871d03e2f87cef0b8c0facb6a6989. 67 Walter Gropius, “Architecture in Japan,” in Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 2. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 5. 70 Ibid., 11. 71 Gropius, “Architecture in Japan,” 8. 72 Ibid., 2, 4, 11. 73 Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, 186. 74 Cram, Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts, 117. 75 Torben Daniel Berns, “The paradox of a modern (Japanese) architecture.” (National Library of Canada, 2004), 37, 85–6.

CHAPTER 3 Nisei Architects

At the same time as Japanese art and architecture was cherished and used as inspiration for Western architects and scholars to find new ways of expressing and experimenting with the concepts and elements, people of Japanese ancestry were subjected to rising discrimination and racism in the United

States. With this constellation, Nisei architects represent the link between the architectural profession’s

“polite” reception of Japanese culture and the more immediate hostility experienced by actual Japanese living in the U. S.

The second generation of Japanese in the United States, the Nisei, represented this discrepancy in varying degrees. To provide some consistency for my analysis, the Nisei architects discussed below are born before the Second World War, between 1900 and 1930, and were affected by the collective trauma of the internment camps—directly or indirectly.

Similar to other minority groups and Japanese-Americans in general, Nisei architects did not only have to be good, but outstanding in order to receive the same amount of recognition equal to their white colleagues.1 Japanese-Americans first were stigmatized for their ethnic background, but in contrast to other minority groups, this ethnic background became steadily more of an advantage in certain cases, as employers and clients realized and appreciated the Japanese-Americans for their unique background, which—personally or professionally—allowed them to stand out from the main stream architecture context. This shift was particularly possible after 1945 with the gradually improving relation between the United States and Japan, seeing Japan not as threat but an ally, and the continued increasing appreciation of Japanese architecture by major architects. Thus, Nisei architects were able to capitalize on their presumed proficiency with Japanese architecture as a valued design tradition as well as their racially but positively considered uniqueness, requiring nothing more than visual proof.

The Architects

The architects discussed below have varying degrees of fame and popularity. First and foremost is

Minoru Yamasaki who received international recognition for his designs of the Saint Louis Airport or the

World Trade Center in New York, followed by George Nakashima, who is better known for his furniture design after he had mostly given up on an architecture career for personal reasons. George Matsumoto is generally less known than Yamasaki ad Nakashima, but he made a crucial contribution in bringing forward a modern movement in North Carolina during his professorship at the North Carolina State

College (later North Carolina State University) under the department head Henry L. Kamphoefner. These three architects will form the core of my discussion about Nisei architects.

Other renowned Nisei architects who are not discussed in detail but contribute to the discussion include Gyo Obata (*1923), a classmate of Matsumoto, and Don Hisaka (1927—2013). Both had worked in Yamasaki’s office in Detroit in the 1950s and would eventually open up their own large scale businesses, HOK, originally in St. Louis, and Hisaka and Associates in Cleveland, respectively. Fred

Toguchi (1922—1982) was a former classmate of Matsumoto as well, opening his own firm in Cleveland.

I will begin by elaborating the background of the three Nisei architects and their stylistic influences, starting chronologically with George Nakashima followed by Minoru Yamasaki and George

Matsumoto.

George Nakashima

George Nakashima (1905—1990) was born and grew up in Spokane, a more rural area in the eastern part of Washington State. As adolescent he had worked on the railways, and continued to do so even during his architectural studies. He took also part in the tedious work in the canneries during summer, but learned from the positive closeness of nature and the comforting solitude that came with this occupation.2

Finishing his undergraduate degree in the University of Washington—starting out in forestry, but changing to architecture after two years—and studying with the benefit a scholarship at École des

Beaux Arts at Fontainebleau in France, Nakashima was accepted at Harvard, again with scholarship support. The teaching at that time had been based on the design theory of Walter Gropius and the

Bauhaus School. While Nakashima agreed with the Bauhaus teaching in so far as he saw good reasons in for including aesthetics with machinery, theory and practice at Harvard was quite different. For that reason Nakashima decided to switch to MIT instead, hoping to find more grounding teaching in engineering. He graduated with a master’s degree in architecture in 1930.3 After graduation he worked in Pennsylvania and New York, until he decided to move to Paris, stating: “Just what drew me to Paris, I don’t quite remember, although in 1928 during my college days I had studied architecture at

Fontainebleau and had spent some time in Paris. Probably, I felt a need to round out my French experience.”4

In 1934, Nakashima was “drawn to Japan, the land of his forebears.” He wanted to find “the creative roots of tradition, [and the] reason why my people look on nature with reverence as they do.”5

He had visited Japan to see relatives before, but never for any length of time. In the same year, he was able to enter Antonin Raymond’s office, an American architect who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Raymond, who had already left Wright’s office at that time and opened his own business in Tokyo, managed to combine modern architecture and traditional Japanese design.

Within the five years that Nakashima stayed in Japan, he also managed to travel a lot. A Japanese colleague familiarized Nakashima with Japanese customs and culture, visiting historic sites in Kyoto,

Nara and even the Grand Shrines in Ise and discovering the essence or “the architectural expression of the innate spirit of the Japanese.” Nakashima learned about “the elegance and power of simplicity, the beauty of proper materials in building, the delicacy of unfinished wood, the traditional and modern creative proportions [...] in both the time-honored Japanese design and in the free, modern concepts,”6 appreciating Japanese design and seeing also its conceptual connection with modern design. He thoroughly examined the ancestral home of his mother as well, finding its peculiarities and details.7

Through his texts, he projected his pride for his heritage and eagerness to inquire more about Japanese design, customs and culture.

In 1937, Nakashima accepted the position to design and supervise a project for Raymond, a multistory dormitory for a religious community in Pondicherry, India. Having been always fascinated by

India, he volunteered without actually intending to stay longer than the project demanded. Drawn in by the philosophy of Indian culture, Nakashima stayed with the community, eventually taking up the project to complete it in Raymond’s name. Despite his deep involvement in the community, he still decided to leave in 1939 and went back to Japan. He worked briefly with Kunio Maekawa, a Japanese colleague from Raymond’s office, and met his future wife, another Nisei visiting from America, in the process. He and his spouse traveled with the last ship for the U.S. mainland to settle in Seattle.8 Even with Nakashima’s excellent education in architecture and work experience with the renowned architect

Antonin Raymond, he became disillusioned by the modern architecture—Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in particular—saying: “The work of Frank Lloyd Wright was especially disappointing to me, although the forms used were interesting and the results were causing a certain excitement in the architectural world. I found the structure and the bones of the building somehow inadequate, however,

49 and the workmanship shoddy. I felt that I must find a new vocation, something that I could coordinate from beginning to end.”9

Thus in order to maintain more control of the making of the design, Nakashima decided that furniture design would offer him the possibility to gain appropriate design with the quality of execution that he would demand from his projects. Unfortunately, after he opened a wood workshop in Seattle by

1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor and thus the subsequent internment forced him lose his business as he was—along with his small family—interned in the camps. The silver lining of this disaster was the acquaintance of a skilled Japanese craftsman in the camp, who could teach Nakashima and further his knowledge. Eventually in 1943, Nakashima was able to contact Raymond who had returned to the

United States and was residing and working in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Raymond vouched for

Nakashima and made it possible for them to stay with him. As Raymond was working on military projects at that time, Nakashima was unable to work in his office and took care of Raymond’s farm instead.10

Nakashima’s aesthetic and Japan

Just outside of New Hope, 1944, Nakashima was able to reestablish a temporary workshop, starting practically from scratch. By finding another permanent plot of land directly in New Hope in 1946,

Nakashima designed and constructed his workshop and home, adding and expanding the collection on his property from 1946 to 1985. While his main focus was still on the furniture making, Nakashima had managed to produce an impressive assortment of buildings on his property. It is also noteworthy that he achieved a cohesion of the architecture out of what he had seen and studied at home and abroad, skillfully fusing both regional and Japanese elements not only as a direct adaptation but also as a successful interpretation of Japanese concepts.11

Nakashima had several influences on his life and design work—both positive and negative. In his autobiography he talked at length about his experiences in Japan, India and France. While in France, first his undergraduate studies in 1928, the again in 1933-34, Nakashima became acquainted with European philosophers. Thanks to the close proximity of the construction site of the Pavilion Suisse to his apartment, he became more familiar with Le Corbusier as well. According to his daughter Mira

Nakashima, George Nakashima developed a deep respect for Le Corbusier’s work and philosophy, that went beyond an appreciation of his engineering and masterful use of building materials to see a spirituality beyond matters of mere “style.” 12

Nakashima honored Japan as the home of his ancestors and sought to understand the intention, concept and philosophies—the “spirit”—of Japanese design in detail. Thus he not only appreciated the craftsmanship but also the underlying tones of the architecture. Raymond’s buildings showed him how to combine modern architecture and traditional Japanese design—and as Nakashima noted that the common characteristics, the “unornamented forms and exposed structural elements” could change their formal expression but the “innate spirit of Zen” remained.13

The Indian project helped him to further his understanding of spirituality and compelled him move away from egocentrism towards a certain humility that remained with him throughout his career.

Buddhism, Shintoism, and Hinduism tempered his Christianity into a worldview requiring design to harmonize manmade construction with the natural world.14

These were the positive influences. But, when Nakashima returned to the U.S. from Asia in 1941 and tried to understand how modern architecture had developed, he was disappointed with what he found. While he appreciated Frank Lloyd Wright’s aesthetic and even agreed with certain part of his design philosophy, Wright’s buildings had been poorly engineered. Wright’s egocentrism grated against

Nakashima quiet respect for craftsmanship and material.15 Wright was not the only master that

Nakashima would come to criticize. Previously, he had turned away from the Bauhaus-inspired teaching

51 at Harvard, seeing a deep discrepancy between their theories and practices. For the same reasons he had turned against Wright, Nakashima would criticize Eero Saarinen’s International-style concrete buildings as “‘unwilling’ shells, because of their thickness.” 16 Nakashima’s rejections inspired him to embrace new forms and materials.

He appreciated the Arts and Craft movement, but did not completely turn away from the machine. Rather, he wanted to combine the machine and his hands into a “small unit.” He seemed to prefer working by hand, but as soon as a machine could do the same work more efficiently, he would turn to it without hesitation. All in all, he emphasized the importance of honesty in the expression of the material and construction.17

The arrogance, that Nakashima condemned in Wright, can be found nowhere in his writing. He remained humble, barely mentioning his achievements, focusing instead on his surroundings and the influence of his environment. He stressed the importance of the materials and their appropriate use and handling. In an article from 1955, Nakashima stressed that architecture is—when it actually comes down to it—about building, a fact that had been unfortunately smothered in romantic or intellectual sentimentality by authority figures he called “gods with small ‘g’s’.” He wanted architecture to not be about style, prestige or dogmas, but about the elements of architecture: “the material, the tools, and machinery, the skill and art of putting the material together.”18 He emphasized the importance of honesty in the expression of the material and construction. He called out: “Let us learn architecture which is science and art of building; let us forget the gods with small ‘g’s’.”19

Minoru Yamasaki

Minoru Yamasaki (1912—1986) was, similar to Nakashima, also born and raised in Washington, but lived in Seattle in his adolescence. In his autobiography, he recollected the brewing racism he faced in his hometown as well as the hardships of working summers in the canneries. He attended the architecture program at the University of Washington, and, graduating in 1934. He turned down an opportunity to work for his Japanese uncle in Texas and went to New York instead.20

Due to the worldwide economic depression, he was unable to find employment in an architecture firm, so he took evening classes at The New York University, worked at a Japanese importing firm and taught coloring classes for a year. When the opportunity arose, to go to Japan to be trained as a professional china designer, he opted to stay in New York to continue looking for work in an architecture firm. He landed his first job in a small firm but, after six months, moved to Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, the firm responsible for the design of the Empire State Building. He stayed there from

1936 to 1943, becoming acquainted with large projects, giving him confidence to work on the same scale in his later career. At this same time, he also taught architecture design at Columbia University.21

Yamasaki married his wife Teruko just a couple of days before the United States declared war on

Japan. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, Yamasaki was also subjected to investigation by the FBI.

However, Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon still supported him and he could resume his work. The distance to the West Coast enabled him to avoid the camps, and Yamasaki even sent for his parents so that they would not have to go through the ordeal of internment. 22

In 1945, Yamasaki was hired by Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls in Detroit. Intending to work there for just a year, Yamasaki ended up staying until 1949, upon which he started out on his own. Shortly after, Yamasaki formed a partnership with two former co-workers, George Hellmuth and Joseph

Leinweber. They simultaneously opened an office in Detroit and in Saint Louis, even though Yamasaki had been aware that this dual-office system could not be a permanent solution. When Yamasaki’s health

53 was in jeopardy due to the strain of working and commuting between two offices, they decided to split the firm five years later. One partner, George Hellmuth, would continue the Saint Louis office with Gyo

Obata, a fellow Nisei and employer of Yamasaki, and George Kassabaum.23

Yamasaki’s aesthetic and Japan

Yamasaki’s being of Japanese descent eventually provided him with commissions which might have given him the impulse to adjust his view on his heritage. One of those projects was in 1954 as Yamasaki received the commission for the design of a U.S. consulate in Kobe. Another Japanese-American architect, George T. Rockrise, was chosen for the same reasons to design the consulate in Fukuoka, and

George Matsumoto had also been noted on a list of suitable candidates. Instead of an architectural statement, these decision seem to be more of a political gesture, as the Nisei architects were expected to bring a certain sensitivity to the Japanese context with their ancestral heritage—probably more symbolic gesture—to strengthen the bond between the two countries.24 This however seemed to add insult to injury, as Japanese-Americans had been in jeopardy for their heritage for decades, until they could conveniently bridge the gap between the United States and Japan. With this commission and the trip to Japan, Yamasaki’s opinion towards his heritage seem to change.

The commission for the U.S. consulate in Kobe gave him the opportunity to travel through

Japan, and he extended his itinerary to include Asia and Europe. Yamasaki has been to Japan before on a family trip during his studies in 1933, so the country was not completely unfamiliar to him. However, in the following three visits in the 1950s, he was mesmerized by the Japanese architecture, stating: “I am sure by making these trips [around the world] as a mature man, I have been able to understand better and appreciate more deeply the qualities of our architectural tradition than I would have been in 1933.

[...] Though I was really not yet qualified to understand the greatness of Japanese art, that summer in

Japan was a wondrous two months for me.”25 Similar to Gropius, Yamasaki was intrigued by the

54 spontaneous character of the architecture, the surprises the buildings had to offer and spoke at length about a Japanese restaurant in Ginza, Tokyo.26

While he admired Japan’s architecture and deemed it necessary to study in detail, especially its modern architecture, he also clarified that it was not only the elements that were readily recognized by other architects to be important—the connection of inside and outside or the wooden structures of post and beam—but the universal serenity of Japanese buildings that should be contemplated. He criticized contemporary buildings as being too “restless,” overtaxing the inhabitant who had to use it every day.

This did not mean there couldn’t be excitement in a building; but, as Yamasaki put it, in general terms the serenity of Japanese buildings should be implemented in the architectural design.27 In an essay, he wrote: “The regard for nature, the elegant detail and the understanding of materials in this architecture had been the source of much inspiration. There are other qualities possibly more subtle but equally important. The element of surprise as used in Japanese architecture is a source of constant delight. It must have been in Japan that Wright learned the impact of surprise in architecture which he uses so masterfully in his buildings. The pleasure of surprise is found in many buildings, large and small.”28

During the same time of his trip to Japan, Yamasaki came to reevaluate his Japanese heritage as well, concluding: “I hadn’t been able to order my life. I felt that something was missing and that I had to keep running after it. But look: everyone has a complex. It took the ulcer to show me what mine was— that I was Japanese.”29 This would also explain the repeated emphasis on racial discrimination during his time in Seattle, during the war, and shortly after his settling down in Detroit, where he was denied moving into a high-class neighborhood, even though he was financially capable to do so. However, this

“coming to terms” seems to not have the positive intonation of Nakashima’s embracing of his heritage.

While both architects had been to Japan, Nakashima took more an active role of a participant in the everyday life of Japan, in contrast to Yamasaki who—based on his explanation—seemed more like an

55 onlooker and visitor. It is also possible that Nakashima enjoyed a more balanced experience in Japan and achieved a different understanding through the guidance of the architects he worked with.

Regarding the consulate, Sanae Nakatani claimed that “Japanese-Americans were incorporated into the scheme of Cold War Orientalism in which their supposed ‘Japaneseness’ was carefully aligned with their modernist aesthetics to suppress potentially threatening an unsettling Otherness.”30 She saw it as golden opportunity for Japanese-American architects to capitalize on their bicultural background and claim a uniqueness that would set them positively apart from their white American colleagues.

According to her, Yamasaki realized how to “negotiate his identities and what was expected of an

American architect of ‘direct Japanese descent’ to bring to American society.”31 Thus he was able to switch his roles according to his audience, presenting himself more American or Japanese depending on his audience, as his heritage gave him enough credibility and agency to “sell” Japanese architecture to an American client. The downside of this was that Yamasaki apparently needed to remind his audience eventually that his design was not as “authentically Japanese” as clients may have expected, but rather his own adaptation of its essence, hence he could just offer a conceptually translated “Nisei” version.32

This can be seen later in the 1960s when Yamasaki received another commission due to his

Japanese-American status. The development for the Japan Center in San Francisco was put into his hands, even though an American architect without Japanese roots had first been given the commission before him, but had been judged unable to deal with the delicate context. Yamasaki was prepared to work with a local architect, Noboru Nakamura, on designing a complex that would be more sensitive to the nuances of a Japanese-American center. His understanding of Japanese culture was prerequisite. A brochure of the San Francisco Redevelopment agency in 1968 said:

“The internationally known Nisei architect, Minoru Yamasaki of Troy, Michigan, was engaged as

the Center's principal architect. Yamasaki's concept of design was to express, within the

limitations of three blocks and in the framework of contemporary architecture, a complex with

the serenity and dignity characteristic of Japanese architecture.

Van Bourg/Nakamura & Associates of Berkeley, California were local architectural

associates responsible for carrying out Yamasaki's design concept. They developed the

mechanical, electrical, and structural engineering techniques and did the architectural detailing

for the Center.”33

This is quite controversial to the reception of Yamasaki, since up to this point no building commissions had overtly recognized a role for “Japanese influence.” According to Yamasaki, his first buildings were nothing but mere imitations of Mies van der Rohe, and even if Mies’ buildings have a Far

Eastern sensitivity in certain details, Yamasaki himself did not draw a direct connection between his style and his heritage. While he had taken historic references for his buildings beginning in the 1950s with his trip to Japan, India and Europe, he was also intrigued by Gothic architecture and frequently used Gothic elements and concepts, creating his own architectural language.

Lastly, in his article “Towards and Architecture of Enjoyment,” published in 1955, Yamasaki described four “fallacies” plaguing architecture: functionality, economy, originality and hero worship.

The article read like a small manifesto of what he considered to be good architecture: he went against the notion that form follows function, on the grounds that functionalism diminished the emotional impact of architecture; the same would apply to the overemphasis of economic factors which led toward banality in architecture. On the other hand, being original “only for the sake of originality”34 risks having the same effect. Finally, idolizing and imitating masters of architecture creates architecture that has already achieved its maximum value, and Yamasaki warned against “[retreating] subconsciously to the seeming safety of established thought.”35

This thought might also apply not only to grand architects, but also to architectural styles and forms. In his design, Yamasaki borrowed heavily from Gothic architecture, but he did not replicate

Gothic cathedrals. In his mini-manifesto, he also advised that, to maintain originality, it had to be not originality for originality’s sake, or out of an obsession for economy or functionality. One simply should seek to combine new materials and elements with more familiar ones, and to stop imitating “the big architects.”

George Matsumoto

Born in San Francisco, George Matsumoto (1922—2016) grew up in a Japanese community in California.

He admitted that he grew up quite segregated, his friends exclusively consisting of other Nisei. He also mentioned his experience in school wherein one particular Japanophile school director made an effort to include Japanese American students and mix them with the student body. Matsumoto graduated high school when he was just sixteen years old and began the architecture program in the University of

California at Berkeley in 1938. His studies were interrupted by the internment of his family during the

Second World War. As a student, he had the opportunity to the leave the internment camp early if he had valid place to study at a university outside of the West Coast. He sent out several applications and was offered admission by a few universities that still accepted Japanese-American students. After a month in the internment camp, he was able to leave and attend Washington University in St. Louis. His decision for the Washington University was based on what he knew of its good reputation and differing teaching methods. Washington University also had a considerate number of other Japanese-American students on its campus, including Gyo Obata (architect), Fred Toguchi (architect) and Setsuko

Matsunaga (sociologist).36 This friendly reception of Japanese-American students seemed to be based on genuine local sympathy and curiosity. Matsumoto reported, echoed by Gyo Obata, that in Saint Louis, he

“did not feel the war at all.”37

After graduating from Washington University in 1943, Matsumoto studied under Eliel Saarinen at the Cranbrook School of Design, gaining his Masters in Architecture in 1945. He briefly worked for

SOM in Chicago, then for Saarinen in Birmingham, Michigan, and later formed a short-termed partnership with Runnells, Clark and Waugh in Kansas City.

Thanks to his winning an award in Chicago, Matsumoto got the chance to work as an instructor in the University of Oklahoma where he met Henry Kamphoefner, the head of the architecture program at that time. When Kamphoefner accepted an appointment at the School of Design at North Carolina

State College, Matsumoto followed him to become a professor there from 1948 until 1961. Matsumoto enjoyed teaching since it gave him the opportunity to “do architecture the way that [he] wanted to do.”38 He liked Buckminster Fuller, later appointed to the North Carolina State College, because, according to Matsumoto, he “simplified things.” Fuller’s thinking might have influenced Matsumoto as well, as he agreed with critics who described his buildings as a result of trying to “boil it down to simple essentials.”39 In 1961, he moved back to the West Coast, reopening his office in San Francisco, and teaching at the University of California, Berkley, from 1961 to 1967. He later left teaching to completely focus on his practice.40

Matsumoto’s aesthetic and Japan

Matsumoto’s design was influenced, due to his studies and work experience, by modernists such as Eliel

Saarinen, Buckminster Fuller and Henry Kamphoefner. Within his tenured professorship at the North

Carolina State College, he designed modern housing for colleagues and himself, setting a design statement by helping to bring the modern movement to North Carolina.41

Educated first in the Beaux-Arts tradition at the University of California in the late 1930s,

Matsumoto admitted that he did not “[get] that much out of Cal and [he] wasn’t a good student.”42 He elaborated that this might have been due to his adolescence attitude, since he matured, after being denied education during his brief internment, once Washington University had accepted him. The approach to studying architecture was more progressive in St. Louis. The curriculum at U.C. Berkeley had leaned heavily on artistic painting and drawing and study of classic architectural details. Matsumoto expressed his dissatisfaction with the vagueness of the finished Beaux Arts designs since there was no direct correlation between the building types and their functions, and, due to the curriculum, he felt more like an art than architecture student.43 Washington University was teaching architecture in a different context, and Matsumoto was happy to say that “they were designing buildings that looked like

60 a firehouse or a school building, a church. It didn’t look like, oh, a Greek temple or something like that.”44 This pragmatic approach was later echoed in his exclamation: “I always used to look to industrial buildings for inspiration in terms of advances in architecture ... they’re [not] concerned with any romantic notion of what a building should look like, but [instead they are concerned with] its performance. Performance counts.”45 This complied with the classic modernist movement in architecture wherein functionality and design are interconnected while ornamentation and the architectural order were of no importance.

At the Cranbrook School of Design, Matsumoto—alongside Charles Eames, Benjamin Baldwin and Gyo Obata among others—was considered one of Eliel Saarinen’s “students who achieved greatly.”46 Saarinen originally came from an Art Deco and Arts and Crafts background; his teaching was based on his approach to finding a solution in architecture based on common sense and practicality, not replicating styles.47

Matsumoto’s building design—especially his early years in North Carolina in the 1950s— reflected simplified, straightforward designs that aspired to include new logic-based solutions and techniques within the building’s context, edging closer to a prefabricated solutions in modern settings.

What set his early buildings apart from the design of other modernist movements, such as the main era of the Bauhaus under Gropius’ leadership, was the symmetry of his buildings. While this might be a vestige of his early Beaux-Arts teaching, his designs showed an affinity to Mies van der Rohe, in their horizontality and proportions. Open floor plans combined secluded rooms, wide-open panels of glass with direct connections to surrounding areas, and a distinct lack of ornamentation.48

Matsumoto had visited Japan with his family during his architecture studies in 1941; he had stayed with relatives and traveled through the country. Even in an interview held in his late eighties,

Matsumoto seemed quite undecided whether or whether not he had liked Japan, admiring its peculiarities on the one hand but also showing aversion to its foreignness.49

He had opened his mind to the ambiguity of things: he even viewed his studies at Berkeley from different perspectives, seeing little advantage in the Beaux-Arts teaching methods but complimenting the positive social impact the institution and the other students had. He did not express any bitterness over discrimination or the internment during his interviews. Even with the experience of the camps that his family had undergone while he was able to study in St. Louis, he appreciated their hardship and seemed to derive strength for himself out of it. His attitude seemed similar to Nakashima who also put emphasis on the positive aspect of the maltreatment during the Second World War rather than linger on its negative aspects.50

Matsumoto would later explain this notion in terms of the Japanese concept and virtue of gaman, to endure and persist in the face of hardship, the strength to overcome difficulties.51 This concept completely contrasts with the U.S. American social norms, where staying silent in a conflict is considered as a sign of weakness. It is also one indicator of Matsumoto’s respect towards the Japanese culture his family maintained that encouraged and strengthened his positive outlook.

His opinion about the Nisei and architecture reflects the same positivity: “...[A]rchitecture’s been very [...] reasonable, nice to Nisei, contrary to my parent’s fear. Because I’m Japanese, I think they come to me sometimes [...]. Its’s not because [...] the Japanese [have] a monopoly or inside track to creativeness, but, there’s some association there. And I don’t try to discourage that thought, it’s to be encouraged and architects, those that went into architecture did very well.”52 This also reflects his notion of embracing his ethnicity and being able to actually gain an advantage out of it, despite the initial negativity that Japanese-Americans used to receive.

The Houses

In order to further understand the impact of their cultural, educational and social encounters in an architectural context, I will look carefully at a specific subject of their work. As subject, I chose the houses they had built for themselves. Sharing the same typology and their design not being obstructed by the requirements of an additional client, the houses present powerful indexes of the Nisei’s cultural and design identity.

Nakashima—while turning away from architecture as a profession—has designed an array of buildings on his property in New Hope, Pennsylvania, to accommodate several functions, showing a range of different experimental styles, exclusively designed and even executed by himself between 1946 to 1985. The various influences that have shaped Nakashima’s philosophy and design are visible in the cluster of different buildings, and, similar to his furniture design, Nakashima managed to form a delicate cohesion between Japanese and regional elements and concepts.

Yamasaki had two houses: his first house in Troy, Michigan, an old farm house that he had purchased in 1947 and subsequently refurbish himself, and his residence in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, which he had designed in 1972. In particular, his second residence has a close connection to classic modernist buildings by architects such as Mies van der Rohe and managed to implement an unobtrusive modern tranquility.

Matsumoto designed his house in Raleigh, North Carolina, along other modernist buildings in

1952, using predominantly experimental styles and building techniques with an applied straight- forwardness. While there can be drawn certain connections to Japanese design methods, there are also stylistic similarities to Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.

Nakashima Woodwork Shop

Figure 3.1 Site plan for Nakashima Woodwork Shop in Aquetong Road, New Hope, PA, 2017. Based on Google maps.

Figure 3.2 Plot Plan, George Nakashima Woodwork Shop

As Nakashima had written, his philosophy involved keeping control of the building process, so that he could see that his design would be executed adequately and to his quality standards. Thus, it was not surprising that all the buildings on his property had been designed and executed by him with the help of his family and friends. The process took thirty-nine years, from 1946 when he established his workshop in New Hope until 1985, when the last building was constructed. Overall, the complex included twenty structures and all of them—with the exception of the last one from 1985—had been designed by

Nakashima. The ensemble included an art gallery, two workshops, four storage buildings, a showroom, a workers’ club house, four residential buildings, two guest houses, a pool house with swimming pool, a technical building and two garages.53

Overall, the projects have a distinctly modern approach that nonetheless involved traditional craftsmanship. New materials and building styles were combined with natural wooden surfaces and

Japanese detailing. White, unornamented walls were juxtaposed with stone and brick surfaces and natural wood of the construction like the rafters, pillars or the framework of the sliding doors and windows.

Figure 3.3 George Nakashima Woodworker Complex, “George Nakashima Woodworker.” http://www.nakashimawoodworker.com/visit/. Accessed on October 10, 2016.

The buildings were interlinked with its surroundings, starting from the building material. At first it was a necessity to use stones that had been available on the plot of land or in the surrounding area, but Nakashima deliberately intended to employ local materials into his design.54

There is considerable gap between his first two buildings—his workshop and his house which were both built in 1946—and the following structures which were added starting from 1954. Once the

Nakashimas’ financial situation improved and their production expanded, he was able to work on new buildings. With his newer buildings he was more curious in trying out new forms and techniques, successfully adding a vast array of different roof forms, varying between gabled roofs, slanted roofs, rounded roofs and even wave-like roofs. Here, the materiality varied as well, using reinforced concrete shells and consulting with different engineers and architects to optimize their shape, structure and materiality.55

The buildings had a certain simplicity, although they were not lacking details. There were no ornaments, everything of an apparently decorative character directly derived from the structural need.

White walls were juxtaposed with stone and brick and the natural wooden surfaces of the wall panels or the open rafters and pillars. There seemed to be no added colors and no hidden materials. Nakashima intended to approach the material with honesty, an approach that is common for the Arts and Crafts movement.56

Nakashima used literal Japanese elements such as sliding doors with rice paper (shoji), rice straw mats (tatami) and “natural” tree trunks as pillars (maratazuki). His references were both literal and conceptual. The direct connection between the landscape and the building was one indicator, the easy and ambiguous flow between inside and outside another.

Figure 3.4 Workshop, looking north-northeast (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014)

Figure 3.5 Interior view, Showroom, looking west (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014)

Figure 3.6 Conoid Studio, side elevation looking west-northwest (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014)

Figure 3.7 Interior view, Conoid Studio, looking southeast (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014)

Figure 3.8 Arts Building viewed from the Cloister, looking north (©James Rosenthal, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014)

Figure 3.9 [Mira Nakashima’s] House and the Guest House, 1970 (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.222)

Nakashima House

New Hope, PA

Figure 3.10 George Nakashima House, looking southeast, Figure 3.11 Floor plan, George Nakashima House (© James Rosenthal, HABS, 2012 from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014)

Table 3.1 Architectural Elements of the George Nakashima House

George Nakashima House (1946/54) Structure Type masonry with post and beam construction Material wood, stone, concrete, unmilled wooden posts Roof gable roof with overhang (originally concrete shingles; now wooden shingles) Stories 1 Plan Shape free form, asymmetric Space continuous room (living, dining, kitchen); separate rooms (bathroom, bedrooms) Openings floor-to-ceiling windows/glass façade; hinged doors and windows, sliding doors Inside-Out dining room openable at one side Direction entrance from north, glass façade south Outside situated alongside hill; porch Finishes Material Outside stone walls, wooden construction, white plastered walls Inside wooden walls, floor and ceiling Ornamentation no ornamentation Equipment/Features open rafters, Japanese style bath, stone fireplace

Figure 3.12 The living room, ca. 1960 (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.55) Nakashima built his home after the completion of his initial workshop in 1946, and briefly refurbished it in 1954 to add another bedroom and extend the south façade by three feet. It was situated along a hill, the entrance to the north and the more opened façade to the south. The structure was wood in combination with loadbearing stone walls and concrete. The simple gable roof had an overhang on the south side and a lower extension in the north to cover the entrance area.

Nakashima combined many distinctly Japanese elements with regional ones: while the main structure was made out of wood, he used load-bearing stone and concrete walls, hinged doors side by side with sliding doors and a fluid room concept combined with separated bedrooms. There was a stone fireplace, but also a Japanese styled bath. The separation between dining area and living area was a wooden screen that is flanked by an unmilled post, maratazuki. The roof had been covered in concrete shingles—far from the Japanese context, but also unusual for the regional context, too—but these had to be replaced by wooden ones because of leakage problems.

A terrace on the south was accessed from the wide-open façade from the living room, which might be common for a house in California. However, Pennsylvania’s climate offered a bigger challenge to accommodate these principles of openness, suggesting that Nakashima more likely reproduced this openness from Japan. The sliding paper screens are used throughout the building as visual barrier if needed, while almost all doors are hinged.

For his home, Nakashima unashamedly used Japanese elements as direct reference but didn’t slavishly reproduce its architectural vocabulary. He frequently juxtaposed regional elements and took a new spin on known forms. He inserted a small screen right next to the bathroom door that would allow a view to the outside, and while the connection between inside and outside and the bathroom were

Japanese particularities, combining those two was not as common.

The house had no ornamentation to speak of, using natural materials and architectural elements as aesthetic balance. The joinery and timber, the material as well as Japanese elements such as grills, screens or natural posts acted as natural and functional decor of the house.

Figure 3.13 George Nakashima, his wife and daughter in the kitchen (from Figure 3.14 The bathroom, ca. 1950 (from Mira Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Nakashima, 2003, p.54) Legacy of George Nakashima, 2003, p.54)

Reception House

New Hope, PA

Figure 3.16 Floor Plan, Reception House Figure 3.15 Reception House, looking west (© James Rosenthal, HABS, 2012. from David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: George Nakashima Woodworker Complex.” April 2014)

Table 3.2 Architectural Elements of the Reception House

Reception House (1975) Structure Type masonry with post and beam construction Material wood, stone, concrete, cement blocks, unmilled wooden posts Roof gable roof with overhang Stories 1 Plan Shape free form, asymmetric Space continuous open room, separate bathroom and tearoom, lowered entrance area (genkan) Openings floor-to-ceiling openings, sliding doors and windows, hinged doors Inside-Out covered porch and entrance area; façade: more closed off towards entrance, more open towards Direction entrance from north, porch to south Outside situated along hillside Finishes Material Outside stone and white plastered walls, wooden structure visible Inside wood, white plastered walls, sliding paper screens, straw-mat flooring in tearoom, mosaic tiles in bathroom Ornamentation mosaic tiles in bathroom Equipment/Features semi-open rafters, Japanese style bathroom, Japanese style tearoom, Western kitchenette separable with sliding screens; stone fireplace

The Reception House (1975-7) was probably the closest example that Nakashima had designed in a

Japanese style. Also called “Mountain Villa” (sansoo), it was designed as guesthouse and included—besides the living-dining area with a kitchenette—a small room for the tea ceremony and a Japanese-style bath.

Approach and style were similar to Nakashima’s house, this time taking even a step further toward creating an authentic Japanese context. The tearoom was true to its original reference, tatami, niches, Figure 3.17 Reception House, Entrance area (from Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of muted colors, indirect light, and a maratazuki were George Nakashima, 2003, p.27) combined into the ensemble.

Simultaneously, the design was balanced with Western elements: the fireplace, the chimney and the wall at the entrance—all made out of stone—were indicators of Western architecture. Despite the unevenness of materials such as stone, the homogeneity that these stone elements create was also a modern aspect, appreciated by architects such as Philip Johnson who would implement this regularity and homogeneity into his newly coined “International Style.” It also claimed similarity to Le Corbusier’s post-purist style.

There was a fluidity in the floorplan. While there were distinct rooms, such as the tearoom and the bathroom with very specific purposes, the living area stretched between these fixed functions. The main room, even while a continuous space, was but clearly differentiated into specialized areas: a lowered entrance area (genkan), the kitchenette that could be hidden behind paper screen, dining and sitting area are separated by different colored wooden flooring.

The façade was characterized by another combination of traditional settings and modern interpretation. At the east wall, the shape of the window and the material—white plaster, stone and the wooden framework—seemed rather normal, but the abrupt ending of the visible wooden beam and the placement of the window unceremoniously right on top of the concrete brick “base” was quite unique

(see Figure 3.15). The same went for the placement of the windows on the north side. Whereas varied placing of windows was not unusual for Japanese dwellings, the very low positioning right next to the entrance might have been normal for a traditional tearoom, but not an entrance area. While the structure and the material of the façade suggested an elevated construction above ground, the base was actually completely closed by a natural brick wall, slightly backed away from the white façade front to keep a shadow-line and further separate the two elements visually.

The covered veranda appears like a loosely combined Japanese engawa and a Western balcony.

Directly accessible through sliding doors to the living room, there was also a direct connection with the bathroom, making it possible to see into the landscape from the bathtub. Usually, pillars would support the wooden structure from the ground and an outer set of sliding panels would enhance the ambiguity of the space by allowing it to be part of both inside and outside; Nakashima decided to design a veranda hovering over the ground, describing it as more regional than actually Japanese.

The Japanese bath had a more playful approach. The deep bathtub embedded into the floor was covered in green-blue mosaic tiles that emerged from the tub and covered half of the bathroom. Similar to his home, Nakashima inserted an easy visual connection by placing a wide sliding glass door at the southern end. Mira Nakashima wrote: “The view from the Japanese bath, with the family crest on the wall, a grandson’s name in the bath, and the moon-viewing platform angled to reflect the orientation of the adjacent building. [George] Nakashima carefully considered the orientation of each building he designed, not only to the sun and to the surrounding landscape, but also to the nearby buildings. For this reason, some of his building’s corners are not square.”57 In this sense, Nakashima did consider

Figure 3.18 Reception House, Living area (from Mira Nakashima, Figure 3.19 Reception House, Tearoom (from Mira Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of 2003, p.226) George Nakashima, 2003, p.28) positioning and orienting the buildings, but this seems to have been limited to physical attributes rather than out of respect for Fêng Shui considerations of spirituality within the Japanese home, which Bruno

Taut had noted.

All in all, Nakashima successfully managed to implement Japanese ideas and concepts into his designed buildings and juxtapose the traditional elements with new and/or Western materials; rather, he took traditional elements and applied them in new contexts and designs. He did this with an almost visible finesse and easiness, not minimizing the impact of simplified and regulated designs. With the interplay of inside-outside and ambiguous spatial zones, Nakashima mirrored the Japanese sense of layering spaces and sequential rooms in a fluid way.

While the George Nakashima Residence and the Reception House had at the first glance the closest similarities to traditional Japanese dwellings, the application and detail of those elements were reinterpreted and contextualized. The flatness of façades were juxtaposed with new arrangements of elements and modern materials such as concrete (brick). Despite the sometimes rough contrasts, the harmonization of these elements demonstrated Nakashima’s ability to blend the regional with the tradition, the conceptual with the material.

Yamasaki Residence

Yamasaki, working for in Detroit, tried to purchase property in prestigious nearby neighborhoods such as Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe. For the first several years, he was denied entry on account of his race and, in 1947, purchased another parcel of land in Troy instead.58

Yamasaki House

The farmhouse already on the site was built in a Cape Cod style, with a one-storied addition at the gable end. The original façade was thoroughly traditional, with horizontal white wooden battens, vertical windows, shutters, and all symmetrically arranged. Throughout the years, Yamasaki made efforts to modernize the existing structure.

The first indications of his design intentions peeked through, in elements that he would later use in his residence in Bloomfield Hills. In the living room, Yamasaki replaced the regionally typical windows with floor-to-ceiling openings, applying the same concept to the doors as well. From the inside the rooms appeared very clear, unornamented, and organized, stretching over the complete first floor and creating an open floor plan within the existing structure, uncluttered except for one elegant polished steel column close to the entrance for structural support. Its thinness and materiality made it almost blend into the background. The carpeted floor, the white plastered walls and ceiling and even the accentuated wooden entrance door and a wooden niche would be elements that reappeared later on in

Figure 3.20 Yamasaki's house in Troy, before refurbishment Figure 3.21 Yamasaki's house in Troy, 1958 (Erza Stoller © (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) Esto)

77 other designs. One part of the façade was pushed out further, creating a certain in-betweenness of being out in the open and still firmly being a part of the living room. This was another element of ambiguity that Yamasaki would repeat in his later work.

The wide openings of the house in Troy afforded an unimpeded view of the yard. In contrast to his later residence, Yamasaki’s first house was limited to the existing structure. Its modernized openness offered little protection from the prying view from the outside. This might be something that Yamasaki had intentionally addressed and fixed later.

According to an article in the Architectural Forum, the remodeled living room was “designed with the sensitivity and restraint characteristics of finest Japanese architecture,”59 and while it does have calmness and openness that can be traced back to Japanese dwellings, it is at least equally strongly connected to classic modern architecture of the West.

Minoru Yamasaki and Temura Hirashiki Residence

Bloomfield Hills, MI

Figure 3.23 Site plan of Yamasaki Residence, 2016, based on Google Maps.

Figure 3.24 Plot Plan of Yamasaki Residence

Figure 3.25 View of entry courtyard from Yallop, Rob, and Todd Figure 3.26 Upper Floor plan, Yamasaki Residence Walsh. “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, Minoru and Teruko Hirashiki, House.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Ann Arbor, MI: Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture / MI SHPO, April 2013. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13000905.pdf, p.24)

Table 3.3 Architectural Elements of the Minoru Yamasaki Residence

Minoru Yamasaki and Temura Hirashiki Residence (1972/86) Structure Type curtain wall and masonry construction Material brick, concrete, steel, aluminum Roof flat roof Stories 2 Plan Shape L-shaped, asymmetrical Space continuously open floor plan (living room, dining room, corridor); separate rooms (kitchen, bedrooms, bathroom) Openings floor-to-ceiling doors and windows; hinged doors; sliding doors towards terrace Inside-Out covered terrace; open view towards lake/back yard, connected with terrain Direction access from south-west, glass façade to yard in north-east Outside terrace on lower floor, layering of yard: 1) maintained front yard (mainly grass and shrubs) towards street; 2) stylized courtyard, 3) natural backyard; entrance at upper level Finishes Material Outside yellow brick, steel beams, glass façade Inside white plastered walls (with wooden upper and lower rim) and ceiling; flooring with carpet and tiles Ornamentation sculpture between front yard and courtyard, and between dining and living area Equipment/Features fireplace; swimming pool

Yamasaki’s two-story residence was situated on a hillside, the street and the access on the top and the lake at the bottom of the property. It had a flat roof, was L-shaped and formed an open angle towards the street that also enclosed a courtyard, and framing the entrance to the building.

The façade was clearly articulated, with opened and closed surfaces. The structural materials were beige brick walls and dark painted steel beams. Floor-to-ceiling windows juxtaposed the closed-off surfaces of the masonry. The building had no artificial ornamentation; its only decorative elements were sculptures and paintings in the yard and within the building.

The shape of the building had a certain serenity and calmness;60 it was angular and clearly organized. The inner structure of the living space was quite fluid, separating specific functions such as the bedrooms, bathrooms and the kitchen with closeable doorways only when necessary. Even these doorways, spanning from floor to ceiling, stayed true to the overall regimen of the design.

The entrance is situated within the open angle, further emphasized with the wooden floor-to- ceiling door. The flooring material transitioned smoothly to connect the outside yard with the interior.

This connection was even more accentuated by the floor-to-ceiling fenestration throughout that left the

Figure 3.27 View of entry foyer (from Yallop, Rob, and Todd Walsh. Figure 3.28 View of dining room, facing living room “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, Minoru and (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State Teruko Hirashiki, House.” National Register of Historic Places University) Registration Form. Ann Arbor, MI: Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture / MI SHPO, April 2013. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13000905.pdf, p.33) 81

Figure 3.29 View of living room, facing fireplace (Courtesy of Figure 3.30 View of living room, facing backyard (Courtesy Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University) view between inside and outside unobstructed. The corridor connecting the rooms on the upper floor was open and with the curtains drawn back, completely visible from the outside, serving as a buffer zone. The private rooms, such as the dining room, living room and bedrooms were oriented towards the lake opposite from the street. Despite the openness of the corridor, the more “fluid” rooms in an open- floor plan behind it were hidden by large columns, walls and the chimney that left enough space to see the openness of the overall floorplan from the outside, but still provided privacy. Thus, the corridor as well as the area of the courtyard covered by the roof right in front of the entrance created a grey zone, leading step by step to differing levels in visibility and privacy. The glass façade towards the lake was pushed back to create a covered outside area on both levels of the building. The smooth transition between the inside and outside flooring on the same level and the large fenestrations allowed an unobstructed view of nature.

The use of materials was used straightforward: brick was used in masonry walls supporting the roof structure and steel was used for frames and beams. The interior walls were painted white and accentuated with a wooden rim along the edges connecting it to the floor and to separate them.

Moveable elements such as doors and cabinets were made out of wood.

Features and amenities were consistently more American: separated kitchen, multiple bathrooms, open dining room and living room with fireplace, and a completely integrated garage; all features commonly found in American homes. The generous built-in closets could have come from

Japanese as easily as Western examples.

The overall design has similarities to Mies which seems ironic since Yamasaki had previously scoffed at his own “imitations” of Mies when he had addressed his early designs from the late forties, early fifties.61 Nevertheless, the house still conformed to his design ideas of tranquility and serenity that

Yamasaki recognized when he had seen Japan and its architecture. The house suggested a certain lightness and transparency often associated with the high modern style, it modified this by using solid elements to avoid prying views from the outside, privacy needs trumping the need to “appear modern.”

The landscaping could be divided into three organized levels: the maintained and mainly grass- covered front yard, the highly stylized, the almost manicured courtyard, and the mostly untouched

Figure 3.31 View of front door and courtyard before Figure 3.32 View of front door looking northeast (from Yallop, Rob, remodeling (Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne and Todd Walsh. “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, State University) Minoru and Teruko Hirashiki, House.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Ann Arbor, MI: Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture / MI SHPO, April 2013. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13000905.pdf, p.26)

83 backyard that extended toward the lake. Instead of removing everything that could hinder the view to the lake, Yamasaki seemed to intentionally preserve the naturally grown trees. Before its remodeling, the courtyard leading to the main entrance had a pathway undulating through a pebbled area. Small trees and shrubs were planted along it. The pathway ended next to the entrance door instead of leading right to its center, creating a tongue-in-cheek character, similar to the Vanna Venturi House designed by the postmodernist Robert Venturi in 1962. The courtyard had a slight Japanesque character to it, dimmed and simplified by later remodeling. The current courtyard was completely filled out with an even concrete surface, small shrubs surrounding its edges, and the area between the courtyard and the glass façade is filled out with large tiles. The front yard appears to be a more typical American front yard with a vast grassed area punctuated by shrubs to create a buffer between the street and the courtyard.

Overall, the connection to Japanese architecture were established as spatial references instead of physical details and structures, which simultaneously drew parallels to classic modernists’ designs, for example the Lemke House of Mies van der Rohe (Berlin, 1933). Not only the floor-to-ceiling façade, but also the floor-to-ceiling doorways and openings are alike. The spacing and volume of the façade, the materiality and the L-shape plan and proportion drew parallels, too. The interaction with inside and

Figure 3.33 Mies van der Rohe, Lemke House, View from Garden (from Krohn, Carsten. Mies van der Rohe: the built work. 2014, p.97)

84 outside was as important as in Japanese houses, and the fenestration and openness emphasized this connection. But, instead of allowing an open engagement with the outside, the connection mostly based on visual parameters. The house itself also worked with the landscape, and instead of creating the image of a building set on a plot of land, it actually reacted to the slope’s incline and direction. As Rob

Yallop and Todd Walsh had mentioned in their description made for the National Registration of Historic

Places, the house reflects a serenity and calmness that Yamasaki had appreciated in Japan’s architecture and expressed here in his own residence as a “refuge from the chaos of the modern condition.”62 From an outside point of view, the Yamasaki residence seemed unobtrusive and somewhat reserved, in contrast to the rich interior. The whole floor plan was very generous, compared to the modest size of

Nakashima’s dwelling which, admittedly, had been built by Nakashima at the beginning of his career, not his peak.

Matsumoto House

Raleigh, NC

Figure 3.34 Site plan for Matsumoto House in Runnymede Road, Raleigh, 2016. Based on Google maps.

Figure 3.35 Plot Plan of Matsumoto House

Figure 3.36 Matsumoto Residence – Entrance at night Figure 3.37 Upper Floor plan, Matsumoto House (from “George Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Triangle Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist Masters Gallery, September 15, 2016)

Table 3.4 Architectural Elements of the George Matsumoto House

George Matsumoto House (1954) Structure Type post and beam-framed construction with masonry construction Material wood, stone, concrete Roof flat roof Stories 2 Plan Shape rectangular with indented corners, symmetric, based on rigid grid Space continuous open room (living room, dining room, corridor), separate rooms (bedroom, bathroom), encloseable kitchen Openings hinged doors and windows, quasi floor-to-ceiling openings Inside-Out façade: closed off to street, open to yard; Direction entrance in the north-west (street), open façade in the south-east (yard) Outside situated alongside hill, layered yard: 1) stylized front yard, 2) natural backyard Finishes Material Outside white cement panels, wood, stone walls Inside white plastered and wooden walls, wooden ceiling and flooring Ornamentation no ornamentation Equipment/Features open rafters, western kitchen and bathroom; fireplace

Figure 3.38 View of living room, facing west (from “George Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Triangle Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist Masters Gallery, September 15, 2016)

Built in 1954, the Matsumoto house was part of the first residential work by the new faculty of the

School of Design at the North Carolina State College. Matsumoto designed it for himself and his family, finding a lot that was situated in Raleigh, relatively close to the campus of the School of Design.63

The building was two stories high with a flat roof and situated along a hillside with its access and the street facing the top of the hill. In this constellation, the entrance was on the upper floor, along with the living and dining room, three bedrooms, the bathroom and the kitchen. Space for the utility room, a recreation room and the car port was on the lower level. The main was is made out of wood, with additional brickwork in the lower level and mainly plywood and white cement board as exterior and interior walls.

The design was simple and straightforward. The overall plan was regulated by a grid, with part of the east and west sides pushing out of it. The entrance was centered on the north side, with two cubic rooms—the kitchen and the bathroom—framing it. All rooms facing south had a completely openable façade towards the covered porch. The regulation was not only visible in the structural grid, but also in the treatment of the façade with regulated wall panels and windows, as well as the symmetry that went through the whole building. The exposed wooden beams gave the interior a rhythmic balance

88 and formed a natural separation for the rooms. Throughout the same fenestration was used, even though the actual rooms behind the façade differed in size and function. Looking at the plan, the openings still work well with the arrangement of rooms and areas.

The exposed beams of the upper and lower level extended and were visible in the façade.

Especially with masonry wall in the basement being pushed back and protruding from the façade (see figure 3.40), the upper level seems separated and almost floating. The ends of the northern brick wall of the basement had no structural purpose and seem more an aesthetic, almost Miesian element that appeared slightly unusual within the otherwise regulated and functional aspects of the building, but it still was worked in seamlessly with the overall aesthetic of the building.

Compared to other classic modern designs—where steel, concrete and oftentimes white flat surfaces predominated—, the distinctive use of wood in the façade combined with the white of the cement boards struck a striking resemblance to Japanese houses, emphasized by the regularity of the façade, but the rhythmic appearance also rang true with modernist practices of prefabrication and modularization. The wooden boards still maintained a modern flatness that helps to avoid a rustic

Figure 3.39 View of Porch (from “George Figure 3.40 View of East façade (from “George Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Matsumoto, FAIA (1922-2016).” Triangle Triangle Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist Masters Gallery, September 15, Modernist Archive, Inc. US Modernist 2016) Masters Gallery, September 15, 2016)

89 character. While certain structural elements were visible, the house’s lack of ornamentation added to the straight-forwardness of its design. The two slim window bands on the north side had a very modern aspect, each illuminating the upper and lower floor and giving the building an abstract character in the dark. The windows on the south side reached from the floor to the lower end of the structural beams, leaving a fixed glass infill between the ceiling and beams. While these have some resemblance to

Japanese interiors, they most likely derived from structural necessity.

The porch with its completely openable façade defined an ambiguous zone between inside and outside and did not seem too different from the Japanese engawa, but reference to porches of

American homes was more likely. Compared to the Japanese example, Matsumoto’s porch acts structurally more like a balcony, supported not by outer columns as in the case of the Japanese engawa but by cantilevers. It operated like a direct extension of the living room, though, especially due to the widely openable façade, which gave a strong sense of Japanese “inside-outness.”

The simplicity, regularity, connection to its surroundings and appropriate use of materials, the omission of ornamentation and the flatness of the surfaces suggested a close connection to Japanese architecture. However, a competing influence of modern design from such available influences as

Marcel Breuer also seemed plausible. The two protruding ends on the east and west side of the house formed an alcove-like extension on the east, with room for closets on the west. From the outside, they reminded one faintly of a to-bukuro, a vertical stowaway box for the wooden rain shutters amado used along the Japanese veranda. However, this connection might come across quite forced as well. All in all, parallels can be drawn, but the closeness to classic western modernism seems equally plausible.

Double-Coding and Hybridity in the Nisei Architects’ Designs and Professions

Similar to the development with the Japanese-American population in general, Nisei architects were confronted with the question of identity and belonging. The three Nisei architects discussed in detail above had to relate to a society that kept reminding them of their Japanese heritage.

As Nakatani has pointed out in her article, attributing uniqueness to their ethnicity gave Nisei architects such as Yamasaki the leverage to proclaim his individual design influenced by Japanese architecture—“outside of mainstream but within the accepted boundaries of American architectural tradition”64—in the same way as Nakashima was able to combine Japanese and regional elements to create a unique ensemble of architecture and furniture. Matsumoto said that he had profited from his

Japanese heritage and encouraged the positive attribution to his Japanese-American peers.

Matsumoto’s classmate Gyo Obata would say "I actually think it helped me [...] I never really encountered racism and I always thought my being of Japanese descent helped potential clients remember me."65 Whether Obata chose to overlook it, or minimize its impact and focus on encouragement and positivity—like Nakashima and Matsumoto had done—is debatable. Fred Toguchi, a

Nisei architect who settled in Cleveland, was said to be “a modernist who favored simplicity and following Nature’s quiet wisdom,” which was immediately followed with the statement of “[his]

Japanese heritage may have had something to do with it.”66 There are also other instances; Don Hisaka, who was active primarily in Cleveland, had various designs, but whenever it was mentioned that

“characteristic attention paid to the surroundings and their relationship to the building,”67 the author did not put a Japanese trademark on it.

While these architects managed to succeed in their architecture professions, stereotyping was still a problem. Despite stereotyping having a positive spin this time, it still put these three Nisei architects—to an extent and with a certain intensity—into a box. While they should not be simply

91 limited to this labeled box, their common Japanese roots gave them enough momentum to distance themselves positively from their white American colleagues.

The inspiration, intensity and appearance of Japanese architecture or elements in the houses

I’ve reviewed varies greatly. It’s definite in some, and vague at best in others. Often, other architectural origins seem just as plausible, such as from pervasive forces of modernism, promoted by such strong geographically and/or historically close figures as Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier.

If Yamasaki had not been Japanese-American, the lamps in his residence might “look Japanese” for other reasons. Modernism might as easily explain rooms that represent Japanese serenity, or, how the remodeling of his previous house in Troy was “designed with the sensitivity and restrain characteristic of the finest Japanese architecture.”68 The niche and subtle platforms in the living room of his first house, distinctly designed to accommodate flower arrangements, did have Japanese characteristics, but as the article pointed out as well, the ‘platforms’ could just as easily be seen as a part of the modernized version of the bay windows. Again, save for his own house’s design, Yamasaki’s designs did not have much similarity with Japanese architecture and borrows more from historical

European elements. In almost all cases, the question of whether Japanese influence was direct, indirect, consciously deployed for professional advantage, or coincidental with modernism’s parallel sensibilities is up for debate.

Nakashima had been aware of the benefits of Japanese craftsmanship and spatial conception, but he seemed to use it for creating architecture and furniture that he deemed personally good and sound, not for the accolades of critics. He didn’t intend to please any certain audience; rather he designed the way he considered was objectively and personally the best and this quality attracted a certain kind of client, not just Japanophiles. Still, he needed to actually bring his work ideal to the client, and as his daughter described it, his “task was to charm clients, to persuade them that the aura of

92 oriental peace that he seemed to personify would somehow become a part of their lives if their homes or offices were outfitted with Nakashima furniture.”69

Of the three Nisei architects I have presented, Matsumoto’s work appears to be the least connected with Japanese architecture. The only remark his home in Raleigh towards his heritage got was that it had “a Wrightian and a Japanese concern for the site, orientation and privacy.”70 By traditional Japanese standards, orientation and the access to the house was certainly important.

Situating the entrance at the northern end of the house does not conform with Japanese rules, however; and although the façade was more closed off to the street and open towards the garden, such inner orientation can be also found in American houses. It can be argued, had Matsumoto not been

Japanese-American, no one would have bothered to make this particular connection. However,

Matsumoto openly admitted profiting from his Japanese ethnicity, even though his architecture has more similarities with other modern architectural styles. It might show that he capitalized from the positive impression, but didn’t feel compelled to serve the stereotype of Japanese architecture. It certainly might have helped, that Japanese architecture was equated with good architecture in general and as such perceived. Admittedly, this association had to be followed up with an adequate quality of design and execution, but Matsumoto did not fail to meet these expectations.

These three Nisei architects’ understanding of Japanese architecture showed both similarities and differences. Both Nakashima and Yamasaki respected the craftsmanship and the execution of the architecture. However, while Yamasaki deemed the craftsmanship important, he put more emphasis on the spatial quality of the structure—the ‘serenity’ in his words—and the elements of surprise, deriving a more conceptual understanding of Japanese architecture that he would later implement in his own design. For Nakashima, the Japanese “spirit” was essential. He drew parallels between structure, material, and proportions as a coherent entity. Matsumoto, in comparison, took a different approach:

93 while he realized the frequent association between Japanese-Americans and Japanese architecture, he did not seem to openly express too much interest in Japanese architecture itself.

All in all, the ambiguity of the design, already present with the interpretations of non-Japanese architects, was relevant for Nisei architects as well, because they faced the same dilemma. In most cases, their heritage seem to be enough to legitimate at least one connection with Japanese design, even though other architects with similar design decisions would not have been connected to the same ideals. If pushed, the connection can be made in several instances, but it has no stronger basis than the ties afforded by their ethnic background. Yamasaki had encountered this directly as he had pointed out at a lecture once: “I jokingly protest that those who contend that my buildings have a distinctly Oriental flavor have seen my face or name before seeing my work.”71

Endnotes

1 Harry H. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, 2. ed, Prentice-Hall Ethnic Groups in American Life Series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 103. 2 George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections, 1st ed (Tokyo ; New York: Kodansha International, 1981), 43–47. 3 Ibid., 43–9; Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 13–5. 4 Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree, 49. 5 Ibid., 55. 6 Ibid., 58. 7 Ibid., 55–6. 8 Ibid., 61–9. 9 Ibid., 69. 10 Ibid., 69–71. 11 Ibid., 70–73. 12 Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit, 16–9; Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree, 49–53. 13 all quotes in this paragraph derive from Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree, 58. 14 Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit, 34–9. 15 Ibid., 25–6. 16 Ibid., 136. 17 Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree, 72, 116, 132. 18 George Nakashima, “Actuality,” Perspecta 3 (1955): 26, doi:10.2307/1566832. 19 Ibid., 33; Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree, 116. 20 Tawny Ryan Nelb, “The Yamasaki Collection, Archives of Michigan Needs Assessment Analysis Report.pdf,” Needs Assesment Analysis Report (Midland, Michigan: Archives of Michigan, Nelb Archival Consulting, Inc., December 30, 2010), 3, http://www.seekingmichigan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/Yamasaki-Report.pdf. 21 Ibid., 5; Minoru Yamasaki, A Life in Architecture, 1st ed (New York: Weatherhill, 1979), 18.

22 Yamasaki, A Life in Architecture, 20–1. 23 Ibid., 22–4; cf. Nelb, “The Yamasaki Collection, Archives of Michigan Needs Assessment Analysis Report.pdf,” 6. 24 Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies, rev. 2. ed (New York: Princeton Architectural, 2011), 148. 25 Yamasaki, A Life in Architecture, 18. 26 Ibid., 24, 29–30. 27 Minoru Yamasaki, Minoru Yamasaki interview: Oral Histories, interview by Virginia Harriman, August 1959, Research Collections, Smithsonian Institute, Archive of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/minoru-yamasaki-interview-6235#transcript. 28 Minoru Yamasaki, “Towards an Architecture for Enjoyment,” Architectural Record 118, no. 2 (August 1955): 145. 29 cited in Bert Winther-Tamaki, “Minoru Yamasaki: Contradiction of Scale in the Career of the Nisei Architect of the World’s Largest Building,” Asian American Studies Center, Amerasia Journal, 26, no. 3 (2000): 168. 30 Sanae Nakatani, “Blueprints for New Designs: Japanese American Cultural Ambassadorship during the Cold War,” Journal of Asian American Studies 19, no. 3 (October 2016): 354, doi:10.1353/jaas.2016.0031. 31 Ibid., 359. 32 Ibid., 358–363. 33 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1968), 3–4, https://ia600801.us.archive.org/13/items/japanesecultural1968sanf/japanesecultural1968sanf.pdf. 34 Yamasaki, “Towards an Architecture for Enjoyment,” 143. 35 Ibid., 144. 36 George Matsumoto, Interview with George Matsumoto, interview by Paul Watanabe, May 11, 2011, University Archives & Special Collections, University of Massachusetts Boston, http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15774coll5/id/12. 37 Marlene Ann Birkman, Gyo Obata, and Kiku Obata, Gyo Obata: Architect, Clients, Reflections (Mulgrave, Vic: Images Publ, 2010), vii; Matsumoto, Interview with George Matsumoto. 38 Matsumoto, Interview with George Matsumoto. 39 Ibid. 40 “George Matsumoto Papers, 1945-1991 | NCSU Special Collections Research Center Collection Guides,” NCSU Libraries, September 15, 2016, https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/findingaids/mc00042/access; George Matsumoto, Japanese American Incarceration / WWII American Home Front Oral History Project, interview by David Dunham and Candice Fukumoto, Transcript, 2015, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkley, http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/matsumoto_george_2015.pdf. 41 Simplicity, Order, and Discipline : The Work of George Matsumoto from the NCSU Libraries’ Special Collections (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State University, 1997), 13. 42 Matsumoto, Interview with George Matsumoto. 43 Matsumoto, WWII American Home Front Oral History Project, 9–10. 44 Ibid., 27. 45 Simplicity, Order, and Discipline, 18. 46 Albert Christ-Janer, Eliel Saarinen: Finnish-American Architect and Educator, Rev. ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 86. 47 Ibid., 83. 48 Simplicity, Order, and Discipline, 18, 53. 49 Matsumoto, Interview with George Matsumoto. 50 Ibid.; Matsumoto, WWII American Home Front Oral History Project. 51 Matsumoto, WWII American Home Front Oral History Project; Brian Niiya and Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, Calif.), eds., Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 1993), 143. 52 Matsumoto, Interview with George Matsumoto. 53 cf. David Kimmerly, “National Register of Historic Places: Nakashima, George House, Studio and Workshop,” National Register of Historic Places Continuation Form (Doylestown, PA: Heritage Conservancy, November 2007), https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/weekly_features/NakashimaHouse-Studio.pdf. 54 Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree, 71–2. 55 Ibid., 72; Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit, 136–7. 95

56 Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree, 116. 57 Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit, 228. 58 Yamasaki, A Life in Architecture, 22–3. 59 “How to Rejuvenate a 125-Year Old House,” Architectural Forum 95, no. 6 (December 1951): 112. 60 cf. Rob Yallop and Todd Walsh, “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, Minoru and Teruko Hirashiki, House,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (Ann Arbor, MI: Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture / MI SHPO, April 2013), https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13000905.pdf. 61 Yamasaki, A Life in Architecture, 24. 62 Yallop and Walsh, “National Register of Historic Places: Yamasaki, Minoru and Teruko Hirashiki, House,” 15. 63 Simplicity, Order, and Discipline, 13. 64 Nakatani, “Blueprints for New Designs,” 363. 65 Rob McManamy, “Only in America,” Building Design & Construction, July 2002, 40. 66 Dennis Dooley, “Fred S. Toguchi: 1965 Cleveland Arts Prize for Architecture,” Cleveland Arts Prize, accessed February 21, 2017, http://clevelandartsprize.org/awardees/fred_toguchi.html. 67 Nina Freedlander Gibans, Creative Essence: Cleveland’s Sense of Place (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2005), 38–9. 68 “How to Rejuvenate a 125-Year Old House,” 112. 69 Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit, 116. 70 Black, David R., “National Register of Historic Places: Matsumoto House,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (Raleigh: Black & Black, Preservation Consultants, April 1994), 4 (Sec.8), http://www.hpo.ncdcr.gov/nr/WA3943.pdf. 71 Minoru Yamasaki, “A Humanist Architecture for America and Its Relation to the Traditional Architecture of Japan,” RIBA Journal 68, no. 3 (January 1961): 94.

CHAPTER 4 Conclusion

Numerous American architects have used and been inspired by Japanese design, however, for American architects with Japanese roots, this issue becomes almost an existential question.

One of the main issues that kept following Nisei architects was the problem of stereotyping and discrimination. Not only applicable to their private lives in the United States—as they were subjected to different degrees of discrimination—their professional lives were also clouded by predetermined judgements made from the outside. Unfortunately, as the second generation of an immigrating group, stereotyping seems to have been unavoidable. However, in light of contradicting views about the

Japanese culture presented by Japanese-Americans in the United States, and the admiration of Japanese architecture by American professionals and scholars without Japanese roots, Nisei architects were standing in a particularly ambiguous spot in the midst of these opposing perceptions of their heritage.

Living in a culture that did not allow them to disavow their Japanese heritage, Nisei architects were forced to answer the question of identity and belonging not just personally, but professionally.

The discrepancy appears to be most visible with Yamasaki. Confronted with his Japanese roots,

Yamasaki seemed pained to “come to terms” with it, and once he had the chance to visit Japan, he shifted his perception of his own heritage. In a lecture on humanist architecture in 1961, Yamasaki said in the beginning: “Frequent visits to the Orient and Japan have helped to clarify my belief that the understanding of certain qualities in Japanese architecture will help architects to shape the kind of environment necessary to better life. Being a Nisei probably makes me a logical candidate for this kind of discussion.”1 As quoted before, Yamasaki continued: “Though I jokingly protest that those who contend that my buildings have a distinct Oriental flavour have seen my face or name before seeing my work, I am fully aware that my admiration of certain intrinsic qualities in Japanese architecture has had a positive effect on the underlying philosophy on which I try to base my designs.” Yamasaki affirmed his position, as Nisei, as the logical choice for the middleman between an American audience and Japanese

97 architecture. At the same time, he took a step back, saying that his architecture did not intend to represent obvious Japanese elements. If someone read those into his buildings, they would assuming that his heritage had ruled out other factors. This illuminates Yamasaki’s struggle when he took up his mediator position, as Nakatani had pointed out, walking the fine line of having a logical understanding of Japanese architecture and simultaneously being rooted in the American context.

Nakashima did not appear to have the same frustration that Yamasaki experiences since, based on his writing, he openly embraced his heritage and took pride in it. A friend had considered him to be more Japanese than an actual Japanese. His daughter explained this notion of Nakashima that he

“would not submit to the oppressive inferiority complexes prevalent in most [Nisei] but instead sensed a need to prove there was an innate goodness in the people most Americans regarded as enemy aliens.”2

Matsumoto—even while utilizing barely any Japanese elements in his design—could convert the stereotype and turn his association with Japanese architecture into something that worked to his positive advantage.

The “styles” of association with Japanese design also derives from the wide variations in the interpretation of Japanese architecture. As explained earlier and in regard to what is considered to be

Japanese architecture, there is no clear consensus within the discussion of Western architects and scholars. The variety of interpretations and understanding of Japan and its architecture not only opened the discourse about authenticity and value, but it also attracted a wider audience to the discussion.

Based on the different “lenses” that each viewer used to observe and study Japanese architecture and depending on the changing discussion of architecture throughout the years, different aspects and angles were seen to be important. Decorative elements, the craftsmanship, and eventually conceptual ideas deriving from the Japanese architecture were emphasized. Parts that did not correspond to viewers’ values were dismissed. Even among the Nisei architects, there was no completely consistent understanding of Japanese architecture. Even where parallels and the appreciation of certain elements

98 and concepts existed, the implementations and interpretations differed. What these architects had most in common was the throughout positivity directed towards the perceived quality or ideal spatiality of

Japanese architecture, considered to be deeply imbedded in the Japanese culture.

This thesis does not aim to clarify what Japanese architecture is in its essence, but focuses instead on the spectrum of interpretations and associations that were triggered in architects and scholars observing it from an outsider’s point of view. Their “lenses” were thus heavily clouded by a preexisting value system that applied and projected the parameter of each architect’s opinion about what was good and sound architecture about Japanese architecture. Wright probably phrased it best when he proclaimed he found “confirmation” in the Japanese buildings. How much of his aesthetic was predetermined before he directly came in contact with Japanese architecture is up for debate, but

Japanese architecture resonated very well with his value system. In a similar way, other architects— including Nisei architects—observed in Japanese architecture something remarkable and admirable.

Their careers were spent trying to translate or integrate these aspects into their own language or encouraging others to do so.

With the variety of ideas about Japanese architecture constructed from an outsider’s perspective, it is also tempting to consider recombining these attributes and connections to work in hopes of discovering some new, more productive pattern—if the onlooker is motivated to do so.

Especially with modern architects from the 1930s and onwards, the abstraction or “distillation” of

Japanese architecture and its concepts made the principles resonate well with a wider audience, thanks to their abstractness and relevance to an extended architectural spectrum. This resonance allows for a double coding. Werner Blaser demonstrates this by drawing many parallels between Mies van der

Rohe’s design and the Far Eastern aesthetic. While his main argument concentrates on the similarities in thought between Mies and Chinese architecture, he also connects Japanese architecture and the philosophy of Zen to Mies’ buildings.3

As much as Western scholars have viewed Japanese architecture through various “lenses,” various audience have had in certain cases also specific expectations and demand to impose on Nisei architects’ work. While this is not the case for every observer and every Nisei architect, the inclination and even attraction towards Japanese architecture and aesthetics can be persistent at times. But, as the designs of the U. S. Consulates in Japan (1954) and the Japan Center in San Francisco (1968) and the

Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles (1999) suggest, the Japanese-American connection can be overwhelmed with political symbolism concerns. For example, was the choice of the Nisei architect, Gyo Obata, for the Japanese-American National Museum, based on the parameters of the design situation or on the audience whose approval was needed for the project?4

Once the world-respected authority figures, Taut, Neutra, and Gropius, had validated Japanese architecture, society in general and not just specialist scholars felt comfortable with the idea that

Japanese architecture could play a major role in American tastes and figure into its built environment.

Combined with the improved relations between Japan and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the initial “burden” of the Japanese heritage turned into an agency, the thought of incorporating

Japanese aesthetic into American architecture was more attractive—especially for Japanese-Americans and especially when compared to the prewar years—and eventually even sought after. However, and as initially stated, even if the immediate connection with Japanese architecture was considered to be positive, especially with the generally good reception of Japanese design, stereotyping proved itself to be a persistent and problematic issue. Nakashima, Yamasaki and Matsumoto have shown us three different ways of addressing this issue.

Endnotes

1 Minoru Yamasaki, “A Humanist Architecture for America and Its Relation to the Traditional Architecture of Japan,” RIBA Journal 68, no. 3 (January 1961): 94. 2 Mira Nakashima, Nature, Form, & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 43.

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3 Werner Blaser and Johannes Malms, West Meets East: Mies van Der Rohe, 2nd, enl. ed (Basel ; Boston: Birkhäuser-Publishers for Architecture, 2001), 108–9. 4 Chris Komai, “New Pavilion Designed By Architect Gyo Obata Opens January 23 At Japanese American National Museum In Los Angeles: Opening Weekend Honors Community Support Cultural Partnerships Celebrate the American Experience,” Japanese American National Museum, January 23, 1999, http://www.janm.org/press/release/36/.

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Appendix

George Nakashima House (1946/54) and Reception House (1975)

○3 ○4 ○5 ○5 ○1 1 Living Room ○2 2 Dining Area 3 Kitchen ○5 4 Bathroom 5 Bedroom

Figure 0.1 George Nakashima House--Floor Plan

○3

4 ○5 ○2 ○

1 Living Room ○1 ○4 2 Dining Area 3 Kitchen 4 Bathroom

5 Tearoom

Figure 0.2 Reception House--Floor Plan

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Figure 0.4 Kimmerly, David. George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop, Buck County, PA, Floor Plan George Nakashima House. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/weekly_features/NakashimaHouse-Studio.pdf Accessed October 24 2017. National Register of Historic Places: Nakashima George House, Studio and Workshop. November 2007.

Figure 0.3 Kimmerly, David. George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop, Buck County, PA, Floor Plan Reception House. https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/weekly_features/NakashimaHouse-Studio.pdf Accessed October 24 2017. National Register of Historic Places: Nakashima George House, Studio and Workshop. November 2007.

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Yamasaki Residence (1972)

1 Living Room 2 Dining Area

3 Kitchen 4 Bathroom 5 Bedroom 6 Foyer

7 Music Room 8 Garage

○7

○8

○4 ○4

○5 ○5 ○1 ○2 ○3

Figure 0.5 Yamasaki Residence--First Floor Plan

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1 Living Room 2 Dining Area

3 Kitchen 4 Bathroom 5 Bedroom 6 Multipurpose Room

7 Furnace Room

○7

○3 ○4 ○4

○5 ○5 ○6 ○5 ○7

Figure 0.6 Yamasaki Residence--Basement Plan

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Figure 0.7 Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Minoru Yamasaki—First Floor Plan, provided by Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Figure 0.8 Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Minoru Yamasaki--Basement Plan, provided by Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

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Matsumoto House (1954)

○5 ○5 ○1

○5 ○2 ○4 ○3

Figure 0.9 Matsumoto House--First Floor Plan

○6 1 Living Room 2 Dining Area 3 Kitchen 8 ○ 4 Bathroom 7 ○ 5 Bedroom

6 Studio 7 Utility

8 Carport

Figure 0.10 Matsumoto House--Basement Plan

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Figure 0.11 Matsumoto George, “Matsumoto Residence—First Floor Plan and Details,” George Matsumoto Papers, 1945-1991 (MC00042), Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries; https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00042-005- ff0013-000-001_0003, Accessed January 16, 2017; "NCSU Libraries’ Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Materials"

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Figure 0.12 Matsumoto George, “Matsumoto Residence—Basement and Foundation Plan,” George Matsumoto Papers, 1945- 1991 (MC00042), Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries; https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00042- 005-ff0013-000-001_0004, Accessed January 16, 2017; "NCSU Libraries’ Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Materials"

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