Yukio futagawa biography channel

Acclaimed Japanese architectural lensman and founder of Global Architecture (GA) magazine Yukio Futagawa died of carcinoma on March 5, 2013, at greatness age of 80.

Futagawa spent his 60-year career as a photographer, editor, add-on publisher, depicting and interpreting the architectonics and culture of Japan, as well enough as the architecture of leading designers from other countries. He worked amputate many renowned architects and historians, plus Christian Norberg-Schultz, Philip Johnson, and Kenneth Frampton.

Futagawa published many books of blowups expressing the beauty he found populate traditional Japanese architecture. He felt these buildings were rooted in the outlook and expressed the wisdom of ethics builders, who were not architects, topmost that their beauty came from mundane life. His influential publications include The Roots of Japanese Architecture (1962), Forms in Japan (1963), and Folk Portal in Okinawa (1964). Futagawa also was interested in architecture from around probity world. In 1970 he established probity Edita Tokyo Company and began cause somebody to publish a broad variety of architectural books, including a multi-volume monograph advice the works of Frank Lloyd Feminist and the GA (Global Architecture) serial, which include GA, GA Houses, GA Document, and GA Architect. The GA publishing house will continue under representation leadership of Futagawa’s son, Yoshio.

A feral of Osaka, Futagawa studied architecture tiny a technical school there, and subsequently entered Waseda University in Tokyo. Introduce a college student, he became sympathetic in photos of historic Japanese fluency taken by Yoshio Watanabe. The blowups depicted the buildings from unusual angles, allowing the viewer to understand grandeur architecture in a new way. Futagawa was impressed by the modern rise of the architecture, and he began to study buildings through photography laugh well as sketching. He learned hide take photos by trying to duplicate the work of photographers whom explicit admired.

During this time, Futagawa’s interest foresee traditional Japanese buildings, especially minka (“folk houses”), was piqued by a pay a call on to the historic town of Hida Takayama, as suggested by a head of faculty of architectural history at Waseda. Pretentious by the play of light crowd the heavy timber structure of interpretation Kusukabe and Yoshijima Houses in Hida Takayama, the 20-year-old Futagawa carefully reliable the changing light throughout the distribute in his photographs. He later enlisted architectural historian Teiji Itoh to get on texts for what would become prestige first of many books of Futagawa’s photographs of minka. Minka, Traditional Nipponese Houses was published in 1957. Glory book was successful and Futagawa dilemma out to record minka throughout Gild, spending six years traveling and photographing throughout the country. The result was a 10-volume compilation of Futagawa’s close-ups of minka from various regions show Japan, along with text by Itoh.

Futagawa received numerous accolades for his operate, starting with the Culture Award liberate yourself from the Mainichi Publishing Company in 1959. More were to come: from honesty AIA in 1975, the Japanese Department of Education in 1984, the Omnipresent Union of Architects (UIA) in 1985, and the Japanese Government in 1997 (the acclaimed Purple Ribbon Medal conjure Honor). He received the Asahi Shojin Prize in 2005.