Thirty years before he designed the seminal Fallingwater (1935), Frank Lloyd Wright made his first visit to Japan, the country whose art and architecture would greatly influence his work to come. While in Japan, the only place where Wright lived and worked outside the U.S., he designed some 14 buildings, only six of which would be built. And as it turns out, some of them wouldn't even have come to fruition if not for Arata Endo, the Japanese architect Wright hired as chief draftsman for his major Imperial Hotel project in Tokyo.
In 1922, with months till the Imperial Hotel's completion, Wright left Japan for good, leaving Endo to finish the project. The building did open (in 1923) and was eventually demolished (in 1967), but Endo would go on to design the Koshien Hotel in Nishinomiya, Japan, an Imperial Hotel of his own also in the Mayan Revival style. That's not all: Endo also led the completion of the Yodokō Guest House, the only surviving Frank Lloyd Wright residential home in the country.
Get the full story at Spoon & Tomago.
· Arata Endo: the architect who carried on Frank Lloyd Wright's Legacy in Japan [Spoon & Tomago]
· All Frank Lloyd Wright posts. [Curbed National]