1932 - 2013

Though he never raised a building, the photographer and editor Yukio Futagawa was one of key figures of modern architecture in Japan. He was born in 1932 in Osaka, where he studied architecture and took an interest in vernacular construction and classicisim in his country on discovering photos by Yoshio Watanabe that established unexpected links between Japanese tradition and western modernity. This interest encouraged him to dedicate his career entirely to photography, and eventually also led to the ten-volume Traditional Japanese Houses, published throughout the 1950s, and which became a monumental effort to document Japan’s classical past at a time when it was threatened by fierce developmentalism. The project was followed in the next decades by shoots of modern architecture in Japan – buildings by Tange, Ando, Kurokawa or Kikutake; by collaborations with historians like Christian Norberg-Schulz or Kenneth Frampton; and, last but not least, the huge work of photographing the complete oeuvre of Frank Lloyd Wright when he was at the helm of Global Architecture (GA), which he founded in 1970.