u:japan lectures s03e01- Yola Gloaguen

| Abstract |

Antonin Raymond is one of few Western architects who allow us to explore the dynamics at work in the development of modern architecture in a non-Western context. Together with his wife and work partner Noemi Pernessin, the Czech born American architect arrived in Japan on the eve of 1920 to join Frank Lloyd’s international team and assist with the building of the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Soon, Raymond opened his own office in the capital, setting out to become one of the pioneers of modern architecture in Japan. The human and technical challenges taken on by the architect and his international team are embodied in a large body of work produced between 1921 and 1938, particularly a large number of private houses and villas designed in Tokyo and its surrounding resort areas. Such works reflect the increasing demand for the design of a dwelling suited to both a Western and Japanese lifestyles by Tokyo’s international elites. It also reveals the technical challenges of fire and earthquake-proof construction in the domestic field. This is reflected in both the spatial design and construction techniques adopted by Raymond and his office over the first 15 years of his practice, drawing both on the international modernist idiom of the interwar period and the characteristics of premodern local architecture. After a brief presentation of Raymond’s pre-Japan background, the talk will focus on the architect’s design process, from a spatial and technical point of view, as well as his role in the genesis of modern Japanese architecture. The presentation of various architectural examples will highlight the way Raymond and his team developed a way of design based on the appropriation and adaptation of selected elements of the Japanese vernacular into the Western modernist idiom, which itself had to be re-evaluated in the particular context of Japan. Through the medium of architecture, this talk offers a reflection on the reassessment of the usual binaries of Western influence and Japanese adaptation.

| Bio |

Yola Gloaguen is a post-doctoral researcher at the Eats Asian Civilisation Research Centre in Paris, France. After receiving her degree in Architecture from Paris La Villette School of Architecture, she became a postgraduate student at Kyoto University and studied the history of modern architecture in Japan, with a focus on cultural and technological exchange between Japan and the Western world. In this context, she took a particular interest in the work of Czech born American architect Antonin Raymond (1888-1976), who lived and practised in Tokyo for 43 years, starting in 1921. In 2016, Yola Gloaguen obtained a PhD from École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, with her dissertation entitled Les villas réalisées par Antonin Raymond dans le Japon des années 1920 et 1930. Une synthèse entre modernisme occidental et habitat vernaculaire japonais (Villas designed by Antonin Raymond in interwar Japan – A Synthesis between Western Modernism and the Japanese Vernacular). Since then she has regularly contributed papers and book chapters to publications on the history of Japanese architecture and landscape. She is currently preparing the publication of a monograph based on her PhD dissertation.