What links are there between Piet Mondrian’s unfinished work Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–4) and post-war Japanese and Japanese-style architectural photography?
As far back as the mid-1950s, critics and photographers were inclined to link Mondrian’s painting with modern Japanese architecture and some historians were to go so far as to assert that Mondrian himself had been influenced by traditional Japanese architecture. These powerful associations contributed to the convergence of Western and Japanese architectural modernity. They also underpinned the survival of Japonisme in architecture, or put another way, of the neo-Japonisme that emerged after the Second World War. However, while this kinship between Mondrian’s abstraction and the aesthetic of Japanese architecture is little apparent in architecture, it does show in architectural photography. This book, which takes an oblique look at Mondrian, examines the works of the foremost among Japanese and American architectural photographers to interpret the dynamics of how the world of architecture was Japanized between 1945 and 1985.
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Table of contents
- Foreword by Michael Lucken 7
- Neo-Japonisme and architectural photography 13
- Writing the history of neo-Japonisme in architecture from 1936 to 1985 19
- By way of background:
How the techniques of architectural drawing and photography developed 41 - Japan Boogie Woogie
W. Blaser, N. Carver, Y. Ishimoto, Y. Watanabe, T. Satô, Y. Futagawa 49 - Neo-Japonisme in Hollywood?
Richard Neutra and Juilus Shulman 81 - Photographs in neo-Japanese style since 1955
From Julius Shulman to Futagawa Ykio 99 - Lewis Mumford, "The Sky Line - Status Quo", 1947 113
- Bibliography of books and articles cited 121
- Index 126