WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Interviews

Of Homes and Windows in the 20th Century: In Conversation with Ken Tadashi Oshima, the Curator of Living Modernity: Experiments in Housing, 1920s–1970s

In the twentieth century, as waves of modernization swept across the globe, the home became a site of architectural experimentation—an arena…

27 Jun 2025

Columns

Windows of Japanese Modernist Architecture

The Windows of Tomoya Masuda’s Naruto Cultural Center: A Faintly Bright Louvered Space

The Naruto Cultural Center is a posthumous work by architect Tomoya Masuda. It is one of several buildings that the former Kyoto University professor designed in Naruto, Tokushima. Takahiro Toji, author of Tomoya Masuda’s Architectural World (Eimei Information Design, 2023), provides his reading of the building’s foyer—a concrete space with a unique quality of light, produced by its distinctive vertical louvers—based on Masuda’s architectural philosophy.
Note: The building is closed as of 2024 due to seismic retrofitting work.

Text: Takahiro Taji
Photography: Yuki Moriya