Tetsuro Yoshida

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Main Post Office Tōkyō before the renovation
Main post office today: only the facade of the old building

Tetsuro Yoshida ( Japanese 吉田 鉄 郎 Yoshida Tetsurō , born May 18, 1894 in Toyama Prefecture , died September 8, 1956 ) was a Japanese architect who was also known in the West for his books on Japanese architecture.

Live and act

Yoshida graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at Tokyo University in 1919 and entered the Department of Communications, where they were busy with modern design standards and practical systems. As a result of this activity, he designed many public buildings, especially post and telegraph offices in Japan. At the beginning he worked with a neoclassical design language, but for the main post office in Tōkyō he switched to a design in which the structure of the building was expressed by simple, straight lines. When designing the main post office in Osaka in 1939, he went one step further, in which the facade now perfectly reflected the function of the building.

He is considered one of the most influential pioneers for the introduction of the West into Far Eastern architecture and at the same time was an architect who, thanks to extensive trips to Europe and North America, incorporated the Western architectural language into his own designs, including examples from the architecture of Sweden , Germany and the United States. When the architect Bruno Taut came to Japan in 1933 after leaving Nazi-ruled Germany, it was Yoshida who introduced him to Japanese architecture. In 1935, Yoshida published a book with Wasmuth in Berlin that had grave consequences for the reception of Japanese architecture under the title 'The Japanese House'.

buildings

  • Old Kyoto Central Telephone Office, 1926
  • Tokyo Main Post Office, 1931
  • Osaka Main Post Office, 1939

Fonts

  • The Japanese house. Berlin 1935 (further editions 1954 and 1969)
  • Japanese architecture. Tübingen 1952
  • The Japanese garden. Tuebingen 1957

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. James Steele: Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tracing the Next Generation. Routledge 2017
  2. ^ A b Hyon-Sob Kim: Tetsuro Yoshida (1894–1956) and architectural interchange between East and West. In: arq: Architectural Research Quarterly. Volume 12, No. 1, 2008, pp. 43-57. doi: 10.1017 / S1359135508000924
personal data
SURNAME Yoshida, Tetsuro
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 吉田 鉄 郎 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese architect
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Toyama prefecture
DATE OF DEATH September 8, 1956