ENCOUNTERS is a collaborative bookwork about Umbrella House, Kazuo Shinohara’s smallest residential building.

Built in Tokyo in 1961, Umbrella House was recently saved from demolition and reconstructed at the the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. It represents a pivotal moment in Shinohara’s career as he began moving away from decorative concerns towards his search for an abstract space. Bringing together a range of responses to Umbrella House by practitioners working across fine art, film-making, creative writing, architecture and calligraphy, ENCOUNTERS introduces Shinohara to new audiences and offers timely new readings of his work. Taking a practice-led approach and foregrounding the voices and positions of women, the aim is to expand existing technical, historical and almost exclusively masculine narratives around one of the most influential architects of Japan’s postwar generation.

Many of Shinohara’s clients were artists or writers, and his buildings are known for their enigmatic and poetic qualities, but artistic responses to his work remain scarce. The lack of female voices in discussions around his architecture is also important to address. Contributors to the project are based across the UK, Europe, Japan and the US and represent 11 nationalities/bi-nationalities. Through artworks and texts we offer decentred, feminist critiques of Japanese domestic space; and question the reliability of linguistic, cultural and material processes of translation. The work seeks a coming together of voices and ideas that are receptive, broad-minded and open-ended: by exploring Shinohara’s practice through practice, we open it up to new and valuable interpretations.

This collection brings together books, articles, essays and films that have informed and inspired our research.