April 16, 2025/ 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM

Webinar

To discuss Japanese architecture, this talk series is organized around five concepts unique to Japan: MA, KANE, HAI/Ken Tadashi Oshima & Alicia VolkKYO, IN/EI, and SUKI.

廃墟 (HAI/KYO) refers to ruins that embody the remnants of historical destruction caused by disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods, and wars, while also symbolizing themes of rebirth, recovery, and the creation of new urban landscapes.

To discuss Japanese architecture, this talk series is organized around five concepts unique to Japan: MA, KANE, HAI/KYO, IN/EI, and SUKI. Renowned Japanese architects and scholars will speak at each symposium about their ideas on architecture and the works they have produced. This series offers a unique opportunity to deepen your understanding of Japanese architecture and its cultural concepts by featuring their insights, enriching your perspective on this distinctive architectural heritage through the lens of contemporary practice.

*This lecture was originally scheduled to take place on January 9, 2025. However, due to the wildfires that tragically affected the city of Los Angeles, we missed the opportunity to hear the insights that Professors Oshima and Volk would share about HAIKYO: Destruction and Rebirth. JFLA is proud to announce its plan to offer this session once again, this time as an online panel discussion.

Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he teaches in the areas of trans-national architectural history, theory and design. He has also been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and UCLA. Dr. Oshima is a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and served as President from 2016-18. He curated the exhibition The Wright Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and the World (2023) and is author of Kiyonori Kikutake Between Land and Sea (2015), Global Ends—Towards the Beginning (2012), International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku (2009), and Arata Isozaki (2009).

Alicia Volk is Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (2005) and curator of the exhibition of the same name. Her award-winning book In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (2010) received the Phillips Book Prize. Her latest book is In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Through the analysis of charismatic artworks in a range of mediums and political commitments, it shows how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American empire variously accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II. Volk has been a Japan Foundation-Ishibashi Foundation Fellow, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the School of African and Asian Studies of the University of London, and a Fulbright Research Fellow at Waseda University.

Hitoshi Abe, Professor and former Chair in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the School of Arts and Architecture and Chair in the Study of Contemporary Japan and the Director of the UCLA Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Since 1992, when Dr. Hitoshi Abe won first prize in the Miyagi Stadium Competition and established Atelier Hitoshi Abe, he has maintained an active international design practice based in Sendai, Japan, as well as a schedule of lecturing and publishing, which place him among the leaders in his field.

For the most up-to-date information, please visit this webpage. 

Free, Registration Required

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA xLAB, Japan Foundation Los Angeles