was a Japanese architect and professor.

Biography

Imai was born on 11 January 1895, in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

. He went to

Waseda University , abbreviated as , is a private university, private research university in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as the ''Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō'' by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the school was formally renamed Waseda University in 1902. The university has numerou ...

in Tokyo and graduated with a degree in architecture. He travelled to the

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

Scandinavia Scandinavia; Sámi languages: /. ( ) is a subregion#Europe, subregion in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. In English usage, ''Scandinavia'' most commonly refers to Denmark, ...

, Italy and Spain in 1926. He met

Walter Gropius Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-American architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in conne ...

Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...

Ernst May Ernst May (27 July 1886 – 11 September 1970) was a German architect and city planner. May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during the Weimar Republic period, and in 1930 less successfully expor ...

and others, which asserted an influence on his way of thinking and his architectural style. Like

Togo Murano was a Japanese architect. Although his formative years were between 1910 and 1930, he remained active in design throughout his life and at the time of his death was responsible for over three hundred completed projects. Although his work lacked ...

and

Takamasa Yoshizaka , family name also romanized as Yosizaka, was a Japanese architect and former president of the Architectural Institute of Japan and a keen mountaineer. After graduating from university, he worked at Le Corbusier's atelier in Paris for two years ...

who also trained at Waseda University, Imai had a style which can be categorized as

Expressionist Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

. Impressed with the works of

Antoni Gaudi Antoni is a Catalan, Polish, and Slovene given name and a surname used in the eastern part of Spain, Poland and Slovenia. As a Catalan given name it is a variant of the male names Anton and Antonio. As a Polish given name it is a variant of the fem ...

, he proceeded to promote him in Japan and elsewhere. He also introduced the work of the Austrian mystic,

Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 or 25 February 1861 – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a ...

to Japan. In 1948 his wife Maria Shimko died and he converted to

Catholicism The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

.http://www.gaudidesigner.com/uk/sagrada-familia-japanese-were-the-first-in-the-world-to-show-interest-in-gaudis-works_350.html Gaudi Designer. Retrieved 2009-04-20. Imai died on 20 May 1987, in Tokyo.

Works

Waseda Theatre Museum Tokyo Japan 2006-03-22

* Library at Waseda University (1925) *

Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum and Monument The Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum and Monument were built on Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki, Japan in June 1962 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the canonization by the Roman Catholic Church of the Christians executed on the site on February 5, ...

(1962) *Tokado Imperial Palace (1966)

References

1895 births 1987 deaths Waseda University alumni Japanese architects {{Japan-architect-stub