In 1953, Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura designed a now-classic Japanese house and garden that he called Shofuso. It was built in Nagoya, Japan, and shipped to New York in 1954, where it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and then relocated to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. The curators of MoMA’s House in the Garden exhibition highlighted its synthesis of historic Japanese architecture with modern architecture: the clarity of the house’s post and beam structure, its flexibility of use and the close relationship of indoor and outdoor spaces.
This extensively illustrated volume centers on Yoshimura’s design for Shofuso and two allied . . . .go to book page >>

Although known primarily as a Western landscape photographer, Mark Ruwedel (born 1954) has acknowledged that he fits somewhere in between” a host of sometimes competing, sometimes complementary inspirations. Ruwedel has cited a highly varied range of artistic influences: 19th-century photographers such as Carleton Watkins; 1970s New Topographics photographers such as Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams; Earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer; and even the Surrealists Man Ray and André Breton.
Ruwedel's one-of-a-kind handmade and limited-edition artist's books—most from the Stanford Libraries’ Special Collections—are thought-provoking and often humorous visual essays on his inspirations and influences. Shown together for the . . . .go to book page >>

The Dutch-born photographer Martien Mulder’s (born 1971) new book of images springs from the Japanese concept of ma, which can be described as a pause in time, an interval, or emptiness in space. Teaming up with Amsterdam-based creatives Stef Bakker and Carsten Klein, Mulder embarked on an extensive quest to reveal the ma in her own images, editing from an archive of 25 years of photography. The images in this book are studies of the in-between; some center on details photographed at such close quarters that they lose their context, while others show only the negative space, inactivity or quiet . . . .go to book page >>