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Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Revisited: Traditional Japanese Culture as a Means to Modern American Architecture, an Evening Lecture by Kevin Nute
November 27 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Discover how Japanese culture shaped Frank Lloyd Wright’s work with this evening lecture by AIA Japan! Join Professor Kevin Nute for fresh insights on Wright’s organic design philosophy at Arper’s Showroom, November 27, 2025. The lecture will follow a brief Q&A followed by a small snacks and drinks.
Time: 11/27/2025, 6:30pm
Location: Arper Showroom, Tokyo (address below)
Zoom Online Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88581517905?pwd=ffPET2RF2fYGBgyB3oTRrakhwzu7v8.1
Meeting ID: 885 8151 7905
Passcode: 688845
Lecture Description:
Although it has long been accepted that America’s most famous architect was influenced by Japanese culture, the nature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s debt to Japan has remained unclear. Kevin Nute argues that Japan had a more profound impact on Wright’s approach to design and in particular his notion of the organic than has previously been acknowledged. It suggests that the influence of Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), the leading American authority on Japanese art at the turn of the 20th century, who also happened to be the cousin of Wright’s first employer in Chicago, the Shingle Style architect Joseph Silsbee (1848–1913), was pivotal in bringing together what would become Wright’s twin passions of Japanese art and the organic whole.
Speaker Bio:
Kevin Nute is a professor of architecture at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. He trained at the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge and worked in practice in London, Hong Kong, and Singapore before beginning his research career at the University of Tokyo.
He is the author of Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (1993) which won the 1994 AIA International Monograph Award, Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture (2004), Naturally Animated Architecture (2018), This Here Now (2020), The Constructed Other (2021) and Embodied Time (2024)
His work has been featured in The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine and PBS News. He is currently the 2025 scholar in residence at the Fallingwater Institute.
Image Credit: Kevin Nute
Image Credit: Kevin Nute
Image Credit: Kevin Nute
Image Credit: Kevin Nute
