412 pp. volume on Japanese landscape architecture and garden design, with 12 unnumbered leaves of plates, scattered illustrations and diagrams throughout. Octavo (8 5/8 x 6 inches). Cloth-backed patterned boards, title to spine, with cardboard slipcase illustrated with a modernist design in black and olive green. Some toning and rubbing to slipcase, especially to extremities and spine, light wear along spine of volume, very light scattered foxing, a few pages with handwritten annotations, overall very good. Osaka: Kojinsha, 1936.

This scarce Japanese work contains texts by Tomotaka Nishikawa, Renshichiro Kawakita, Ken Ichiura, and others. Renshichiro Kawakita (1902-1975) was an important Japanese Modernist architect who studied the works of the Viennese Secession architects and the Bauhaus. He was a founding member of the Shinko Kenchiku Renmei (League for New Architects) in 1930, and in 1931, he cofounded the Seikatsu Kosei Kenkyusho (Research Institute of Construction), together with Ken Ichiura, Takehiko Mizutani, Masuji Hamada, Sadanosuke Nakada, Takao Itagaki, and Isaku Ishimura. The institute was founded primarily to hold exhibitions and give lectures, and in November of that year began publication of the journal "Kenchiku Kogei. I See All". The same group together opened a school the following year, the Shikenchiku Kogei Gakuin (School of New Architeture and Design), with the goal of providing "theoretical and technical education for designers with excellent abilities in architecture and crafts for the new age." Here Kawakita developed a "kōsei" curriculum based on the Bauhaus curriculum.

Nishikawa and Ichiura were both affiliated with the Shikenchiku Kogei Gakuin, Nishikawa as a faculty member in the design and crafts department, and Ichiura as a member of the Japan Drywall Research Group who used the school as a salon and event venue.

The volume is illustrated with works by Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Mies Van der Rohe, mixed with other depictions of traditional Japanese architecture and gardens. Pages 287 and 317 are devoted to Le Corbusier's translation of the "Plan Voisin", a planned redevelopment of Paris which involved replacing a large area on the Right Bank of Paris with a number of well-spaced-out skyscrapers in a utopian concept meant to house three million Parisians. The plan was never implemented.

Very scarce; as of October 2025, OCLC locates only two holdings of this work in North American libraries.

Book ID: 53548

Price: $2,250.00