Shoei Yoh, Glass House, Fukuoka, Japan,1984-91 (View in Google maps)

Shoei Yoh, has shunned the Tokyo megalopolis, to live, work and teach in Fukuoka, where he set up his agency in 1970. An economist by training, in the early 1960s he studied at the School of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Springfield, Ohio and set his sights on architecture. His many and varied works are the culmination of much rigorous experimental labour, which comes across clearly in the architecture of several of his houses: Stainless House with light lattice, 1981; Glass House with breathing Grating, 1983; Glass House between Sea and Sky, 1991; Six Cubes in Light, 1994; Sundial House, 1996, etc. For Yoh, these houses all represent “prototypes”, and opportunities to experiment with materials, and spatial and light arrangements, within a minimalist quest for formal simplicity as well as an ever greater economy of technical means. Shoei Yoh’s work stands at the crossroads of western modernist thinking and Japanese culture, and explores a perceptible path combining minimalism and complexity, ecology and technology, nature and architecture.

Bibliography:

1. http://www.archilab.org/public/2001/textes/yohen.htm

Reviewed March 2017 by:

Yue Shang

Xiaolin Lu

Lizhongyang Zhou

Adelina Muntean