Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) created sublimely beautiful, purist houses that have reconfigured and enriched our understanding of domesticity, tradition, structure, scale, nature, and the city. The underlying formalism in Shinohara’s architecture lends his work a poetic quality that fuses simplicity and surprise, the ordered and the unexpected. More than anyone else he laid the foundations for the rigor and vitality of architecture in Japan today.

Seng Kuan is an architectural historian and theorist. He is project associate professor at the University of Tokyo and teaches regularly at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (GSD). He has written extensively on Japan’s postwar architectural culture. Among his publications are Kenzō Tange: Architecture for the World (2012) and Kazuo Shinohara: Traversing the House and the City (2021), both from Lars Müller Publishers in collaboration with Harvard GSD. Kuan is also chief editorial advisor to a+u, a bilingual journal of architecture based in Tokyo and serves on the planning and management committee of TOTO Gallery MA in Tokyo and the research consultative committee of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.