1971 Blue Box House | Designed: Mayumi Miyawaki | Tokyo, Japan

The Japanese architect, Mayumi Miyawaki, inherited a great skill in drawing from his father, Kazuo Miyawaki, and his mother, both of whom were artists, and he studied first at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (BA, 1959); he then specialized in urban design at the University of Tokyo (Master of Technology, 1961). In the late 1960s and early 1970s he conducted scholarly studies of historic Japanese villages. In 1966 he began his career with the design of a house called Chalet Moby Dick, Yamanashi, which incorporated characteristics of both Shinto and Buddhist architecture on the outside, with a cavelike interior. In 1971 he formed the avant-garde group ARCHITEXT with four other architects, but no common design philosophy was promoted.