A collection of gorgeous prints, apparel and products celebrating Shin Takamatsu, one of Japan’s greatest architects, with an incredibly unique & beautifully executed body of mysterious & pregnant work that ought to be far better known, & probably would be if they fit a more stereotypical idea of Japanese design... See our blogpost on Japanese Postmodern Architecture
The most internally coherent and intriguing body of work from the bubble period of Japanese architecture was produced by Kyoto-based architect Shin Takamatsu, whose brooding, obsessively composed and detailed buildings are fiercely personal explorations of architectural synthesis. His works are deep, sometimes frightening psychological journeys made through the act of architecture. He fuses an exceptional range of references together with newly invented motifs, into designs which rival the most iconographically elaborate of Europe’s fin de siècle architecture, only here they create a language of overloaded technology crashing together with subjective poetics, personal angst, and history, in a fusion that only late 20th Japan could have produced.
His Pharaoh Dental Clinic in Kyoto from 1984, Syntax retail building from 1988-90 (now demolished), Octagon in Tokyo from 1990 and Imanishi Motoakasaka in Tokyo from 1991, express these qualities perfectly. Each relatively small in scale, with Pharaoh being positively minute, they are all powerfully expressive forms, even verging on being frighteningly so in the degree of their intensity.
The fierce effect his buildings elicit in visitors was always carefully calibrated by Takamatsu, who has often described the dark and thrilling tensions which pulse in his structures, and which draw passers-by towards them with wary interest, saying of Syntax that it is a “space that is menacing, the parts menacing the whole, the whole menacing the parts, and even the parts menacing each other, just as the whole menaces itself.” Takamatsu produced an astonishing body of work, and much like his Kyoto counterpart Tadao Ando, the precision and consistency, whilst constantly inventing and inquiring, is astonishing.
For our Shin Takamatsu products organised by buildings click HERE
For all our buildings in Japan click HERE
For all our Postmodern buildings click HERE
For all our buildings click HERE
