Obituaries 

Kathryn Findlay

30/04/2015


1953-2014

After graduating from the Architectural Association in London, Kathryn Findlay moved to Japan and there she started working with Arata Isozaki, whose style had then veered towards the postmodern. This trip would change her life, because there she met her husband, Eisaku Ushida, and together they founded the office Ushida Findlay in 1986. From Isozaki the couple inherited the mistrust of modern canons, however, their language would not draw on classicism but on the exploration of the avant-gardes that the Modern Movement left behind, like expressionism and surrealism. Their most well-known works were indeed expressionist or surrealist, like the Truss Wall, a house in Tokyo (1993) whose concrete skin evokes the utopias of Finsterlin, or the Dalinian Soft and Hairy House, built in Tsukuba in 1986. Findlay was the first woman to teach architecture at Tokyo University, but after the couple’s divorce in 1999 she returned to London, where she continued her career with works like the ArcelorMittal Tower (2012), in collaboration with Anish Kapoor. She died at the age of 60 from a brain tumor.


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