The history of modern Japanese architecture, from the end of World War II to the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s, is as complex as its varied actors, their lives, and their theoretical positions. Sometime during the 1960s and 1970s—the years in which Thomas Daniell's An Anatomy of Influence begins—a breakdown in ideology befell Japanese architecture. Originally driven by postwar reconstruction, the profession's totalizing urban vision dissolved into a sea of individual tenets operating in support of personal obsessions. Architectural meanings collided, conflicted, merged, and diverged, while heterogeneous forms of production emerged.

Writing a history of such a volatile time—an era that Pritzker Prize laureate Arata Isozaki has called the “missing pages of history”—must have been daunting even for so qualified a scholar as Thomas Daniell.1 (Professor of architectural history, theory, and criticism at Kyoto University and resident of Japan for more than two decades, Daniell...

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