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This project successfully funded on 25th November 2025, you can still support them with a donation.
Encounters with Umbrella House
London, Greater London, United Kingdom
Aim
Help produce the first UK publication dedicated to Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara. A collaborative artist's book by Michaela Nettell.
The project
'Encounters' is a new artist’s book about Umbrella House, celebrated Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara’s smallest residential building. Built in Tokyo in 1961, Umbrella House represents a pivotal moment in Shinohara’s career before he began moving away from decorative concerns towards his search for an abstract space. It was recently saved from demolition and reconstructed at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany.
Bringing together a range of responses to Umbrella House by practitioners working across fine art, filmmaking, poetry, architecture and calligraphy, 'Encounters' introduces Shinohara to new audiences and offers timely new readings of his work. Foregrounding the voices and positions of women, the project expands existing technical, historical and almost exclusively masculine narratives around one of the most influential architects of Japan’s postwar generation.
New voices
Many of Shinohara’s clients were artists or writers, and his houses are known for their enigmatic and poetic qualities, but artistic responses to his work remain scarce. Female voices have also been underrepresented in discussions around his architecture, and Japanese architecture more broadly. Contributors to the Encounters project are based across the UK, continental Europe, Japan and the US, and represent 11 nationalities / bi-nationalities. Through artworks and texts we offer decentred, feminist critiques of Japanese domestic space, and question the reliability of linguistic, cultural and material processes of translation. The work seeks a coming together of voices and ideas that are receptive, broad-minded and open-ended: by exploring Shinohara’s practice through practice, we open it up to new and valuable interpretations.
Contents
Encounters is the first ever UK publication dedicated to Kazuo Shinohara, and the first artist-led enquiry into his work internationally. Specially-commissioned artworks and texts include:
- new short fiction by Tomoka Shibasaki, author of 'Spring Garden' (Pushkin Press, 2017) and 'A Hundred Years and a Day' (Stone Bridge Press, 2025); translated by Polly Barton, award-winning writer and translator whose translations include 'Hunchback' by Saou Ichikawa and 'Butter' by Asako Yuzuki
- a conversation around the subject of home and belonging between UK-based writer and curator Yuki Sumner and artist Kyoko Hanawa (Emi Kawai), the daughter of Shinohara’s client who lived in Umbrella House for over fifty years
- new paper collages by Lera Samovich, architect and partner at fala atelier. Lera recently completed her PhD at the Faculty of Architecture in Porto on ‘mischievous elements’
- new poetry by Sawako Nakayasu, US-based artist working with language, performance and translation whose books include 'Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals' (Factorial Press, 2011) and 'Costume en Face' (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), a translation of a handwritten notebook of Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance notations
- a visual conversation in painting, drawing and collage by artists Michaela Nettell and Ana Ruepp
- notes on Umbrella House and feminist filmmaking by UK artist Emily Richardson. Emily’s films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally; her work is distributed by LUX, London; Lightcone, Paris; Video Data Bank, Chicago and Canyon Cinema, San Francisco
- drawing series by UK artist Emily Speed exploring Umbrella House's interior as theatrical space. Emily works across drawing, sculpture, moving image and performance to explore relationships between architecture and the human body. She has exhibited widely, including at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Drawing Room London and the Tate galleries
- visual and textual study on Shinohara’s use of space via the art of Japanese calligraphy by architect researcher Mónica Verdejo Ruiz. Mónica is currently a PhD candidate at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, in the Advanced Architectural Design Program
- new text and 5-page concertina fold-out about Shinohara’s collaborator, the painter and set designer Setsu Asakura, by Zurich-based architects DEHLI GROLIMUND ('Residential Architecture by Kazuo Shinohara', Park Books, 2025; 'Kazuo Shinohara: 3 Houses', Quart Publishers, 2019; 'Kazuo Shinohara: The Umbrella House Project', Vitra Design Museum, 2023; 'Kazuo Shinohara: View from this Side', Rollo Press, 2019/22)
- collage series by California fine artist Leigh Wells (2022 Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant recipient), using pages from a 1978 Ikebana photobook by Suido Yamane, founder of the Shinsei School of Ikebana and pioneer of the Freestyle Movement
- edited transcript of a roundtable conversation on Shinohara between international artists and architects: Marcela Aragüez, DEHLI GROLIMUND, Simona Ferrari, Takashi Hayatsu, Michaela Nettell, Emily Richardson, Lera Samovich and Emily Speed. Excerpts of the conversation were published earlier this year as the Risograph pamphlet 'a totally different world', and launched at the Zaha Hadid Foundation as part of London Festival of Architecture 2025
Design
Designed by Marit Münzberg, Encounters will be a beautiful and tactile book that communicates through its form notable aspects of Umbrella House’s structure and materiality, and the ways in which it reinterprets traditional Japanese design. The cover will be printed on Cairn Eco Kraft 280gsm; the inside pages on Anjala White Wove 80gsm. A partial dust jacket in orange vellum slides vertically over the book, effecting tonal shifts in the papers and allowing the two halves of the title to come together.
Publisher
Passengers is an artist-led platform that commissions and curates contemporary art that explores the historical, social and material contexts of various sites and architecture. The initiative was formed in 2016 by artist Julie F Hill in collaboration with architectural practice Gauld Architecture and has since expanded to incorporate offsite exhibitions, residencies and publications. Passengers published Michaela Nettell's first collaborative book 'Less a building: Interactions with the London Zoo Aviary' in 2021, which was described as 'deft and elegant' (Sukhdev Sandhu); ‘very interesting and beautifully produced’ (The Modernist); and as ‘[emphasising] the broad cultural importance of the aviary’ (C20th Society).
Pre-order your copy now!
'Encounters with Kazuo Shinohara's Umbrella House' is due to be published in June 2026. If you would like to buy a copy, please consider ordering in advance at the discounted pre-sale price of £15. Every campaign donation we receive will help ensure production can go ahead as planned; the more we raise, the more copies we can print, and the more widely we can share our work. Thank you!
Reward prints: ‘Church for a pantheist (need not be a house)’, 2 x 2-colour Risograph prints on A3 Heritage White 110gsm, made by Michaela Nettell and Estefania Araujo Bianchi in response to Shinohara’s 1974 Tanikawa House
Reward drawings: (1) 'Umbrella House', ink and paint on canvas, 150x90mm; (2) 'When the peaks of our sky come together my house will have a roof', mixed media on canvas, 165x146mm; (3) 'Umbrella House', ink and paint on canvas, 150x90mm
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made