ONLINE event:

Helena Capkova:
Intersections of Central European and Japanese Modernisms / Bedřich Feuerstein and Antonin Raymond architects

saturday, November 25 at 10 AM (JST)

SPEAKER BIO:

Helena Čapková  is a Tokyo/ Kyoto/Prague based curator, researcher, and art/ architecture history professor at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Since 2010, she has published and lectured extensively about the specific nature of Japanese modernism and avant garde that she considers as an inherent part of art history, traditionally perceived as Western. Her publications on this topic include: Transnational networkers – Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki and the formation of Japanese Modernist Design (2014), Believe in socialism … - architect Bedřich Feuerstein and his perspective on modern Japan and architecture (2016); English-Japanese publication – Antonin Raymond in Japan, 1948-1976, recollections of friends (2022) and Bedřich Feuerstein, architect. Prague-Paris-Tokyo (2022).

LECTURE SUMMARY:

Japanese and Czechoslovak modern architecture history share a surprisingly lot in common. The two countries intersected at the end of the WWI when the Czechoslovak Legions, the founding army troops of the Czechoslovak Republic, started leaving the Siberian front via Japan and as a consequence the first diplomatic contacts were established. The Czechoslovak embassy opened in 1920. Parallel to these developments, Antonín Raymond arrived in Japan from the US and established a successful architectural office in 1921. Raymond invited Feuerstein to join him in 1926 and the two architects created a number of projects in which they merged the foreign and local architectural traditions together. This lecture will introduce the legacy of B. Feuerstein and A. Raymond and their operational strategies in Japan where they worked before and after WWII.