World Observation: Empire, Architecture, and the Global Archive of Ito Chuta

An Architectural Exploration into the Rich Visual Archive of Ito Chuta. World Observation pursues a world history of architecture, arguing for an alternative origin point for what we call "global history" in the rapidly transforming environment of nineteenth-century Japan. Mullane focuses on the career of Ito Chuta (1867-1954), the most influential Japanese architect, historian, theorist, and colonial bureaucrat, and his mission to create a Japan-centric world history of architecture through translation, field study, and the design of new architecture. Drawing from Ito's rich visual archive, much of which has never been reproduced, World Observation critically examines the political and epistemological connections between his world project, empire, and the prospects of global history today. AUTHOR: Matthew Mullane is an Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL. He received his PhD from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo. 47 colour, 68 b/w illustrations

About the Author :
Matthew Mullane is assistant professor of the history and theory of architecture at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Review :
Matthew Mullane examines the work of Itō Chūta, a teacher, architect, architectural historian, and preservationist who played a pivotal role in the development of the architectural profession in Japan. This impressive study is theoretically sophisticated, is based on rigorous archival research, and tackles aspects of Itō's career that some postwar scholarship has shied away from, including his contributions to Japanese imperialism.--Jonathan Reynolds, Barnard College/Columbia University Thanks to this deeply researched study, readers can at last gain a full and nuanced picture of twentieth-century scholar, architect, and pan-Asianist ideologue Itō Chūta. As Mullane demonstrates, Itō's fascinating and eccentric body of work is equally important to our understanding of global architectural modernity as it is to the history of modern Japan.--Jordan Sand, Georgetown University Were World Observation solely a biography of the architect Itō Chūta, it would be a valuable and compelling study, given Itō's importance to the origins of the field of Japanese architecture. But Matthew Mullane's book is so much more. World Observation makes a strong case that the modern practice of observation and the history of architectural design in Japan are inseparable. In doing so, it connects design to drawing, travel, thinking, and writing in ways that are surprising and insightful, and dynamically entangles the emerging field of architecture in Japan to developments elsewhere in Asia and Europe. The result is a richly conceptualized vision of the multinodal origins of modern architecture that will be of interest to readers well beyond the field of architectural history.--Yukio Lippit, Harvard University