UH Mānoa Professor of Architecture Kevin Nute has just published Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Revisited: Traditional Japanese Culture as a Means to Modern American Architecture (London: World Scientific, 2025). The book expands on more than three decades of research by reexamining Wright’s interpretations of traditional Japanese forms in the context of otherness, appropriation, translation and myth.
The book’s predecessor, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (London: Chapman and Hall, 1993) won an International Architectural Monograph Award from the American Institute of Architects. In his foreword to the new book, the contemporary Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, writes:
“This book has played an important part in the ongoing cultural exchange between Japan and the West. …. Personally, I learned a great deal about this exchange and its significance from the original edition of Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan. It stimulated my own interest in traditional Japanese buildings and gave me renewed confidence in my culture. Until then, traditional Japanese architecture seemed to me to have little relevance to the present or future. My own buildings changed as a result, and I began to participate in that great exchange myself.”
Kengo Kuma, Professor of Architecture, University of Tokyo
An internationally recognized authority on Wright’s relationship with Japan, Professor Nute spent his early career in Japan, and joined the University of Hawaiʻi in 2019. He has been invited to give public lectures on the new work at both the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Chicago and the Fallingwater Institute in Pennsylvania, where he will also be a funded scholar in residence next year.
Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Revisited is available at Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Lloyd-Wright-Japan-Revisited/dp/1800616007