Junzō Sakakura

Junzō Sakakura was born in 1901 in Hashima District, Gifu Prefecture, into a family of sake brewers. At the Imperial University of Tokyo he studied art history and was drawn to architecture. He left for France in 1929; on Le Corbusier's recommendation he first took construction courses, then, between 1931 and 1936, he held a key place in Le Corbusier's studio, working on urban planning and house projects. Back in Japan, he returned to Paris to design the Japanese Pavilion for the 1937 Exposition: built on the slope of the Trocadéro, it won the architecture Grand Prix and brought Sakakura international recognition.

He opened his own office in 1940, renamed it in 1946 and added an Osaka branch in 1948; it completed some 300 works until his death in 1969, aged 68. They include the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura and the Institut franco-japonais de Tokyo (1951), the International House of Japan (1955), designed with Kunio Maekawa and Junzō Yoshimura, then Hashima City Hall (Architectural Institute of Japan prize, 1961) and the West Plaza of Shinjuku Station (prize, 1968). In 1958, with Maekawa and Takamasa Yoshizaka, he oversaw the building of Le Corbusier's National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

It was at the Kamakura museum that his theory of harmony between modern architecture and nature took shape. Built beside the Heike pond, the building seems to reach out over the water; in the manner of Le Corbusier, pilotis carry the upper floor and Ōya stone clads the ground floor, and Sakakura drew on his study of how building and garden relate in traditional Japanese architecture. Reinforced concrete is the material of several of his public buildings: in Saga, the Ichimura Memorial Gymnasium has a saddle-shaped roof made of two facing hyperbolic-paraboloid shells; in Iga, the former Ueno City Hall lets daylight down through the skylights of its courtyards; in Ashiya, Luna Hall is covered in Japanese ivy; in Shinjuku, a void carries light and wind down to the underground plaza.

He is also a figure of postwar Japanese design: in 1941 he worked with Charlotte Perriand on an exhibition, represented Japan at the Milan Triennales of 1957 and 1960, chaired the first jury of the Good Design system, created in 1957, and presided from 1964 to 1968 over the Japanese architects' association from which today's Japan Institute of Architects descends.