How differently Asia's design giants were treated only a few decades ago. The now celebrated Pei was once commonly derided as a "Chinaman," and Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese-American architect who went on to design Manhattan's World Trade Center, was barred from living in an exclusive Detroit suburb. In 1955, when Sony introduced the transistor radio, its first major design innovation and international export, made in japan was still the ultimate stigma. The 20th-century giant Isamu Noguchi was a product and symbol of the cultural gap pervasive at that time. With an American mother and a Japanese father, he was widely perceived in the U.S. to be Japanese (although he held an American passport) and widely regarded as American in Japan (he never did learn Japanese fluently). It is a dramatic sign of different times that both countries claim him as their own today. Noguchi was a pivotal figure because his work crossed not only cultural but theoretical borders. In addition to sculpting, he made furniture in the 1940s and in 1951 began designing gardens. His interdisciplinary approach laid the conceptual groundwork for the procession of Japanese designers that would follow. The 1960s were a crucial period not just for Japan but also for much of Asia. The decade marked a time when Asian architects and designers educated overseas returned home_with a renewed sense of their national identity. Like Sri Lanka's Bawa, now 77, many paved the way for a younger generation by employing their Western training to find solutions rooted in their own cultures, and they did so without succumbing to the parochial. Though India's seasoned architect and theoretician Charles Correa pioneered a visually distinctive architectural response to his homeland, his approach is anything but quaint. "Only a decadent architecture looks obsessively backward," the 66-year-old Correa has written. "At its most vital, architecture is an agent of change. To invent tomorrow; that is its finest function." | CONTENT |