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(b New Orleans, LA, March 15, 1873; d New Orleans, 1949).

American photographer. Bellocq is known to have worked as a commercial photographer in New Orleans from 1895 to 1940 and to have photographed for local shipbuilders and in the Chinese sector of New Orleans, although none of this work apparently survives. His photography is known only through prints made by Lee Friedlander from the 89 gelatin dry plate negatives found after Bellocq’s death. These negatives date from c. 1912 and are sympathetic portraits of prostitutes of New Orleans and interior views of their workplaces. Known as the Storyville Portraits, 34 were shown by MOMA, New York, in a travelling exhibition in 1970–71. Bellocq’s life was the subject of Pretty Baby (1978), a film by Louis Malle.

(b San Francisco, CA, June 14, 1921; d Tokyo, Feb 6, 2012).

Japanese photographer, active also in the USA. He was brought up in Japan and in 1939 returned to the USA, where he studied agriculture and architecture before photography. In 1952 he graduated from the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, where he had studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, and in 1953 he returned to Japan. He published works in Japanese photography magazines and a collection of his own photographs, Aru hi, aru tokoro (‘Someday, somewhere’; Tokyo, 1958). At the same time he photographed the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto, one of the great buildings of the 17th century, publishing the results as Katsura (Tokyo, 1960). This collection, which showed the influence of Callahan and Siskind, involved a new way of interpreting the traditional beauty of Japan and was somewhat shocking to the Japanese. His uncompromising style had a strong influence on the photographers working in the Vivo (Esperanto: ‘life’) group, especially Ikko Narahara, Eikoh Hosoe and Kikuji Kawada. Again resident in Chicago from ...

(b Spokane, WA, 1905; d 1990).

American furniture designer and manufacturer. The son of Japanese parents, after an early career as an architect he turned in 1940 to furniture-making, initially in Seattle and then, after a period of internment, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where in 1946 he estabished an independent workshop. The workshop produces both series and individual designs, always in solid hardwood with no veneers; designs reflect both American and Japanese traditions, but are contemporary rather than revivalist. Although Nakashima is sometimes described as one of the founding figures of the American craft movement, his workshop used machine tools and, in the case of his series designs, production methods to create furniture that looks hand-crafted. The workshop is still a family business, and is now run by his daughter Mira (b 1942).

(b Guangzhou, Apr 26, 1917; d New York, NY, May 16, 2019).

American architect of Chinese birth. Pei was born into a wealthy family and after schooling in an English-based school in Shanghai he went to the United States in 1935 to study architecture. Although he would not return to China until 1974, his youthful background including Buddhism and rock gardens played a strong role in his later development. Initially repelled by the Beaux-Arts system, he became reconciled to its strong emphasis on geometry and readable imagery under Dean William Emerson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1940. Pei stayed in Cambridge, working for different architects, and married Eileen Loo, also Chinese born, who studied landscape architecture at Harvard University. Pei continued his studies at Harvard’s architecture school run by the leading Modernist Walter Gropius and he became a close friend of Marcel Breuer, who was teaching there. Pei received a graduate degree in 1946, staying there to teach until ...

(b Kladno, Bohemia [now Czech Republic], May 10, 1888; d Langhorne, PA, Nov 21, 1976).

American architect of Czech birth, active also in Japan. Raymond graduated in 1910 from the Czech Technical University, Prague, where he was particularly influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright; he then immigrated to the USA and worked in New York for Cass Gilbert, who was then involved with the Woolworth Building. Raymond was naturalized in 1914 and entered Wright’s studio at Taliesin, WI, in 1916 for a year. Following a period in Europe, he went with Wright to Japan in 1919 to work on the Imperial Hotel (1919–21; destr. 1968), Tokyo. Deciding to stay in Japan, he opened his own architectural office in Tokyo in 1920. Raymond’s early works continued to be influenced by Wright until 1923, when he designed his own house at Reinanzaka, Tokyo, in the simple, cubic forms of the early Modern Movement with exposed concrete. He played an important role in introducing modern Western architecture to Japan, designing many buildings in the International Style in the 1920s and early 1930s but moving toward a less austere expression in the mid-1930s. He had a considerable influence on such architects as Kunio Maekawa and Junzō Yoshimura. Works of this period include St Paul’s (...

A category of buildings designed to house retail and shopping. It includes arcades, department stores, shopping malls, strip centres, and big-box stores. Retail architecture exists in small towns, big cities, and suburbs: anywhere people congregate. It is as ubiquitous in time and space as the organized exchange of goods for money. It is distinguished from commercial architecture, which, in real estate and architectural practice, can refer more generally to any property that produces income for its investors or owners but does not refer to a building’s architectural function (i.e. retail).

Buildings housing commercial activity have existed since antiquity. Anthropologists have described exchange halls and commercial structures in many cultures, including Roman, Aztec, Tang dynasty China, and Mesopotamian. During the medieval and Renaissance periods, market halls and exchanges were built in cities such as Antwerp, Bruges, London, and Venice, sheltering trading activities at ground level and municipal government functions above (...

(b Reedley, CA, Nov 25, 1919; d Walnut Creek, CA, Aug 30, 2000).

American landscape architect and educator. Sasaki taught from 1953 to 1970 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (HGSD), where he was chairman of the landscape architecture department from 1958 to 1968. In 1953, Sasaki also opened his design practice, which, after several name changes (including Sasaki, Walker and Associates (1959–63), with former student Peter Walker, and Sasaki, Dawson, DeMay Associates (1963–75), with former student Stuart O. Dawson and architect Kenneth DeMay) and its growth from a handful of recent landscape architecture graduates to an interdisciplinary staff of 300 partners and employees, became (after 1975) simply Sasaki Associates, the firm that carries his name and philosophy throughout the world.

The son of Japanese immigrants who farmed in the San Joaquin Valley, Sasaki grew up with an appreciation of the relationship between nature and human endeavor. After Pearl Harbor and before he completed his city planning degree at the University of California, Berkeley, he was caught in the mass internment of Japanese-Americans. Sasaki earned a BFA in landscape architecture in ...

(b Urumqi, Nov 4, 1963).

Chinese architect and teacher. Wang Shu was born in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and studied at the Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeast University) in Jiangsu Province, receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture in 1985 and 1988 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. degree at the School of Architecture of Tongji University in Shanghai in 2000. Wang became a faculty member of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2000, and was named chair of the Architecture Department in 2003 and dean of the School of Architecture in 2007. In 2011 he was the Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

His first architectural commission, completed in 1990, was a youth centre in Haining, a small city near Hangzhou. In 1997 Wang and his architect wife, Lu Wenyu, established the Amateur Architecture Studio in Hangzhou. The name of the firm suggested the couples’ non-professional approach based on everyday life, spontaneity, and experimentation. Both of them received relatively liberal educations in post-Mao China, and belonged to the generation of architects who advocated tectonic modernism combined with regionalism. Some of the built works designed by Wang and the firm are the Library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University (...

(b Jiangxi, China, July 14, 1920; d Greenbrae, CA, Dec 27, 2011).

American architect, teacher and writer. Born to American missionaries in China, Tyng graduated from Radcliffe College in 1942 and received her Masters of Architecture degree from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, in 1944. From 1947 to 1973 she worked with Louis Kahn and was closely involved in the design of many of his buildings, notably the Yale University Art Gallery. During this time she was also Associate Consultant Architect for the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and Redevelopment Authority (1952–3) and for the Mill Creek Pennsylvania Redevelopment Plan. From 1968 she was an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; she also taught at several other colleges, and she practised architecture independently after 1973. In 1975 Tyng received a PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Her highly theoretical research involved the interrelations between physical, natural, and psychic structures and their architectural application. Her dissertation discusses the mathematically based Fibonacci–Divine Proportion as a matrix, ‘linking unpredictable information bits in the brain … to precise proportional mean, or “essence”’. This she related to Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious. An early independent building by Tyng, the Walworth Tyng House (...