(b Shizuoka, 2 April 1925). Japanese architect, teacher and writer. He studied mathematics before enrolling in architecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (B. Eng. 1953; D. Eng. 1967). He then opened his own office in Tokyo and also began a long teaching career at the Institute of Technology, becoming a full professor in 1970. He was thus first and foremost an intellectual before becoming by degrees an architect of international stature through the realization of some 30 houses between 1958 and 1978. Generally regarded as an ‘architect’s architect’, Shinohara was content in his early work to ring the changes on reductively modernized versions of the traditional Japanese house. This changed, however, with his so-called House with a Big Roof (1961), Tokyo. Thereafter his houses tended to be identified not by the place where they were built but by the single-minded image that was the basis of their design. He subsequently produced eccentric works with earthen floors (e.g. at Karuizawa, 1963) and strange, high-pitched interior volumes entirely devoid of furniture. This obsession with an existential iconic architecture reached its apotheosis in a series of stark concrete houses designed between 1970 and 1976: Incomplete House and House at a Crooked Corner, both in Tokyo, a house in Uehara and one in Ashitaka. Together they formed a monumental series that brought this phase of his work to a conclusion. In 1982 Shinohara completed his first public commission, a lightweight, two-storey curtain-walled structure designed for the Ukiyoe Museum, Matsumoto. Six years later he realized his master work, the Alumni Memorial Hall of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (see fig.), a dynamic, metal-clad, steel-framed composition providing reception facilities for the institute.

• Shinohara, Kazuo
  • Japan, §III, 5(iii)(b): Architecture, 1960 and after: New Wave
  • pupils
    • Hasegawa, Itsuko
    • Sakamoto, Kazunari