Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tracing the Next Generation

Contemporary Japanese Architecture presents a clear and comprehensive overview of the historical and cultural framework that informs the work of all Japanese architects, as an introduction to an in-depth investigation of the challenges now occupying the contemporary designers who will be the leaders of the next generation. It separates out the young generation of Japanese architects from the crowded, distinguished, multi-generational field they seek to join, and investigates the topics that absorb them, and the critical issues they face within the new economic reality of Japan and a shifting global order. Salient points in the text are illustrated by beautiful, descriptive images provided by the architects and from the extensive collection of the author. By combining illustrations with timelines and graphics to explain complex ideas, the book is accessible to any student seeking to understand contemporary Japanese architecture.

James Steele is an architect who received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and practiced in the Philadelphia region before accepting a position at Dammam University in Saudi Arabia where he taught for eight years. He then served as Senior Editor at Academy Editions, and taught at the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture in London before relocating to the University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1991, receiving a PhD in Urban Planning and Development at USC in 2002. Professor Steele has taught history and theory as well as design studio, and also organized the first Foreign Studies Program for architecture students in Malaysia in 1998. He administered it up through its fifteenth and final session in 2013 and then founded and became the director of a new undergraduate program in South America, based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has written extensively on contemporary architecture and has been a guest critic and speaker at numerous universities in the United States and internationally.