Encounters with Kazuo Shinohara’s Umbrella House

A research project and publication by Michaela Nettell with: Estefania Araujo Bianchi, DEHLI GROLIMUND, Julie F. Hill, Sawako Nakayasu, Ana Ruepp, Emily Richardson, Lera Samovich, Tomoka Shibasaki, Emily Speed, Yuki Sumner, Mónica Verdejo Ruiz and Leigh Wells

Roundtable participants: Marcela Aragüez, Christian Dehli + Andrea Grolimund, Simona Ferrari, Takashi Hayatsu, Michaela Nettell, Emily Richardson, Lera Samovich and Emily Speed

Publishing partner: Passengers
Editor: Anjana Janardhan
Designer: Marit Münzberg

Encounters is a new artist’s book about celebrated Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara’s smallest residential building. Built in Tokyo in 1961, Umbrella House represents a pivotal moment in Shinohara’s career before he began moving away from decorative concerns towards his search for an abstract space. It was recently saved from demolition and reconstructed at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany.

Bringing together a range of responses to Umbrella House by practitioners working across fine art, filmmaking, poetry, architecture and calligraphy, Encounters introduces Shinohara to new audiences and offers timely new readings of his work. Foregrounding the voices and positions of women, the project expands existing technical, historical and almost exclusively masculine narratives around one of the most influential architects of Japan’s postwar generation.