Found in Translation: Mackintosh, Muthesius and Japan

IF YOU HAVE ALREADY SIGNED UP FOR THE 2024 AGM THERE IS NO NEED TO REGISTER FOR THIS TALK

This event is part of our AGM, but if the talk is the only part that interests you then please find the sign up details for it below.

Click here to sign up for the in-person talk…

Click here to sign up for the online talk…

Click here if you would like to attend the JSOS AGM…

Topic of the talk:

The theme of the talk is the presence of the Japanese influence in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and, in particular, the Glasgow School of Art. This has often been observed but never satisfactorily explained. Rather than simply listing the evidence, this talk will investigate the relationship between him and Hermann Muthesius against the background of the time Muthesius spent working as an architect in Tokyo. Using the correspondence held in the Deutscher Werkbund Archiv, Berlin, as evidence of the close relationship between the two men and the others of Mackintosh’s close group, The Four, which suggests that it was Muthesius’s sensitivity to Japanese architecture which encouraged the direction of Mackintosh’s work in the late 1890s and early 1900s and in so doing, offers an explanation of the more idiosyncratic and unexplained features of the library at the Glasgow School of Art.

Neil Jackson is an architect and architectural historian and Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Liverpool. From 2009 to 2019 he was a Professorial Research Associate and a member of the Japan Research Centre at SOAS. He has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth-century architecture and is currently working on a study of the architect Josiah Conder, the ‘father of modern Japanese architecture’, supported by a Fellowship from the Japan Foundation and the Ishibashi Foundation. His writings on Japan have included the book, Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue (2019), and essays in Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (2020), Setting the Scene: Perspectives on Twentieth Century Theatre Architecture (2015), The Journal of Architecture (April 2013), The Blitz and Its Legacy: From Destruction to Reconstruction (2013) and Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, 7 (2010). In 2017 he led the 20th-Century Society’s tour of Japan.