As one of the leading architects in Japan, Hiroshi Hara has produced major works that include Sapporo Dome, JR Kyoto Station Building, and Umeda Sky Building. Since the 1970s, he has spent over 25 years conducting extensive surveys of villages around the world. His architecture achievements along with his theoretical work on space are among many of his critical contributions to modern architecture.
Trained at Tokyo University, Hara is one of the most accomplished in a new generation of avant-garde New Wave architects who became active beginning in the late 1960s and who were sharply critical of the contemporary urban developments in Japan. Yet, unlike many of his more radical contemporaries, Hara derived his design theories from his extensive studies of vernacular architecture and indigenous settlements in Asia and Africa, in an attempt to bring cultural relevance to avant-garde ideas. He follows a unique anthropological approach to architecture somewhat similar in nature to the one put forward by the members of Team Ten in Europe.
Hara’s early works, the so-called “reflection houses,” such as his own residence at Machida near Tokyo and the Niramu House, Tokyo, display a negative attitude toward the chaotic and volatile conditions of the Japanese city and focus instead upon the internal order of the house as informed by critical aspects of dwelling. They were all shaped along sequences of centrally and symmetrically arranged spaces and appeared as hollowed-out concavities. Many of them implemented scaled-down and metaphorical urban elements, including landmarks, intersections and plazas, and so could be regarded as attempts to create miniature and fantastic cities.
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