Takamasa Yoshizaka

Takamasa Yoshizaka was born in Tokyo in 1917 and graduated from the International School of Geneva in 1933. He entered Waseda University in 1938, studied under Wajirō Kon, the founder of "modernology" (考現学), and took his architecture degree in 1941. Conscripted from 1942 to 1945, he was among the first postwar recipients of a French government grant in 1950 and spent two years in Le Corbusier's Paris studio. Back in Japan he founded his design atelier in 1954, the Yoshizaka Laboratory (吉阪研究室), which was renamed Atelier U (U研究室) in 1963, and he became a professor at Waseda in 1959.

His name is tied to concrete architecture with a sculptural plasticity. The Ura House in Nishinomiya (1956), two volumes set on reinforced-concrete columns, leaves the ground floor open to the surrounding town. The Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1956), which at last gave the country a building of its own instead of a rented room in the Central Pavilion, has walls divided by four protruding partitions and an opening in the middle of the floor that leads to the pilotis. The Athénée Français in Tokyo (1962) won the Architectural Institute of Japan prize. Built from 1965, the Inter-University Seminar House in Hachiōji was a testing ground for his theory of "discontinuous unity" (不連続統一体, DISCONT): a wedge-shaped main building of rough concrete and groups of wooden lodgings sit in the Tama hills, which he made it a rule not to damage, and the whole is put together like a village.

A mountaineer, Yoshizaka took part in the Waseda expedition that crossed equatorial Africa in 1957–58 and climbed Kilimanjaro, then led the 1960 expedition to Mount McKinley in Alaska. He brought this mountain knowledge to his huts. At the Karasawa hut in the Northern Japanese Alps he had a trial cabin built on site to study damage from snow and ice; he shielded the new building of 1963 from avalanches with gabions on one side and, on the other, half-buried it in the slope to shelter it from their thrust. The Nozawa Onsen Lodge (1969), shaped like an acorn, lets snow slide off by itself.

President of the Architectural Institute of Japan, he also translated many works by Le Corbusier. He died in 1980; his drawings and sketches entered the National Archives of Modern Architecture of the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2015.