This paper is funded by the School of Doctorate Studies of the University Iuav of Venice and will be part of my PhD dissertation about Kazuo Shinohara’s work. Since the Japanese book Jutaku kenchiku (Residential Architecture) by Kazuo Shinohara has never been translated into English, the quotations reported here have been translated by me, thanks to Mr Yosuke Taki who did the Italian translation for me.Since, according to Kenneth Frampton, 'regional or national cultures must today, more than ever, be ultimately constituted as locally inflected manifestations of “world culture”’, contemporary Japanese culture would be in this sense the 'world culture' par excellence, structured on two important cultural imports - the first occurred between the 6th and 7th centuries when from China was introduced the ideographic writing, Confucian model of society and along with them Indian Buddhism; and the second one, during the late 19th century, when for the rapid modernization of the country Western politics, science and technology were adopted. Having soon faced, and deeply questioned, the possibilities and problems of a global dimension of the thought, Japanese culture could be considered an original synthesis of universality and local identity where, although the many contradictions, the meeting with the stranger allowed to discover what ‘not to be’, rather than what to be. Starting from the other side of modernity, and tracing the different aspects of the adoption of Modern Movement in Japan, aim of this paper is to introduce the figure of the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) who unveiled the plurality and richness of our spatial structures, the universal and the particular in which we are immersed, most of the time, without consciousness.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
