The best known work of Nobuko and Kameki Tsuchiura is their own home, completed in 1935. The building represents the architects' mastery of interlocking interior spaces. From outside as a massing of white stacked volumes, it may be considered high-International Style modernism, but any student of Wright would recognize his influence, the large window-wall, and the double-height central living space. Wright himself may not have been so complimentary. He expressed disappointment in the Tsuchiuras' embrace of the new movement, writing in a private letter, "[You have] gone over - with [Richard] Neutra - to the gas pipe rail and damper style . . . I am sorry to see the poverty of imagination in you . . ." (from a 1931 letter in the FLWA collection, in Anthony Alofsin, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, p. 224). The actual house, located in the Meguro district of Tokyo, is still well-preserved today thanks to the stewardship of its current owner. It was designated an Important Cultural Property of Tokyo in 1995.
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ludmilla, April 7th, 2017