Shiro Kuramata
The poetic Japanese designer.
Shiro Kuramata worked with glass, acrylic and mesh and made furniture that seems to float. How High the Moon is an armchair of metal mesh.
Shiro Kuramata was born in Tokyo in 1934. He trained in woodworking and then studied interior design at a design school in Tokyo. He worked for a time on interiors for a department store and opened his own office in 1965. Japan was then undergoing rapid modernisation, and Kuramata became part of a new generation of designers who wanted to break with both tradition and Western modernism.
As early as around 1970 he attracted attention with chests of drawers in unexpected, curved and twisted forms. He began working with industrial materials such as glass, acrylic, aluminium and expanded metal and tried to make his furniture seem light, almost weightless. The Glass Chair of 1976 consists of sheets of glass bonded with a new, invisible adhesive. He also designed many shop interiors, including for the fashion designer Issey Miyake.
Kuramata was a member of the Italian design group Memphis from the early 1980s. The How High the Moon armchair of 1986 is made of nickel-plated expanded metal mesh and appears transparent. The Miss Blanche chair of 1988 is made of acrylic with embedded artificial roses and was named after Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire. His work combines a Japanese sensibility for emptiness and stillness with Western industrial technology.
Kuramata died in 1991, aged just 56. The M+ museum in Hong Kong has moved and reconstructed one of his sushi bars from 1988. He is regarded as one of the most poetic designers of the later 20th century.