"Japanese architecture's commanding presence on the world stage can be traced to the struggles of earlier generations of Japan's modernist architects. This first book-length study of Maekawa Kunio (1905-1986) focuses on one of the most distinctive leaders in Japan's modernist architectural community. Maekawa's work and critical writing, produced during a career that lasted from the 1930s to the 1980s, put him at the vanguard of the Japanese architectural profession.

Jonathan Reynolds shows how Maekawa negotiated the transition in Japan between prewar and postwar architecture and how his work, which explored modernism's ambivalence about the relation between "tradition" and contemporary practice, also exploited the new technology and building materials, incorporating them into modernist design and ideology."--BOOK JACKET.