Abstract
From the 1950s onwards, and even more so in the 60s and 70s, the architectural works of such pre-war tenors as Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra were considered to be under Japanese influence and associated with Japonism. Taking advantage of the celebrity of these architects and the star system, critical discourse was built up and slowly asserted, based on photographs signed by the greatest masters of architectural photography at the time, such as Henri Fuermann for Wright or Julius Shulman for Neutra. This Japanese style was a regular feature in post-war magazines. It was imprinted on the minds of a broad public, convinced by press articles and increasingly illustrated books, whose images forcefully crystallized an undeniable Japanese inspiration. Projects closer to the Bauhaus and those of Mies van der Rohe are compared with traditional Japanese architecture, but care is taken not to confuse the two. Critics and historians generally emphasize the progressive spirit of these post-modern achievements, readily associating them with abstract painting and, more specifically, Mondrian's neoplasticism. And Tange Kenzo's prototype work on Villa Katsura, with a preface by Walter Gropius and illustrations by Ishimoto Yasuhiro, has inscribed this parallelism in the collective memory.
Our paper will examine these two neo-Japanese architectural styles. One, a survival of pre-1945 Japonism; the other, the initiator of a post-modernist vision, which makes Japan a historical referent, freeing itself from Rome and ancient Greece. The confrontation of a selection of architectural photographs - by Werner Blaser, Norman N. Carver Jr., Satô Tatsuzô, Watanabe Yoshio, Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Ezra Stoller, Julius Shulman and Futagawa Yukio - will enable us to highlight the small turbulence in discourses on Japanese influence in Western architecture between 1945 and 1975. This confrontation will also reveal a latent, unexpected Japonism in the images themselves. The controlled wiggles of the American photo chambers appear as an extension - or, on the contrary, a negation - of Mondrian's unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1944). In a parallax effect, the off-centering effect of Japanese photographers revealed the survival of a Japanese pictorial tradition. As Kasagi Shizuko's Tokyo Boogie Woogie hit the jukeboxes from 1947 onwards, the aesthetics of these shots became an integral part of the architectural press, right up to the digital age.
