ABSTRACT
The "Shinohara School" is clearly legible today in the work of Toyo Ito, Itsuko Hasagawa, and Kazunari Sakamoto, and so by extension to Kazuo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, and Kengo Kuma as well as their disciples. In 1967, Shinohara also put forward the idea of the "mathematical city", anticipating the Deconstructive discovery of Chaos Theory over a decade later. Two years after Shinohara's Centennial hall appeared, Ishihara Yoshinobu was also promoting the idea of Chaos Theory as a way of understanding Japanese cities in his cult classic A Hidden Order, which is an attempt to make sense of the seeming irrationality of Tokyo. Much of Shinohara's reputation for indecipherability, can simply be put down to his being far ahead of his time, as a scientist who intuitively understood that the trajectory of contemporary architecture was becoming inexorably tied to that of global capitalism. Post-structuralists will be especially heartened to hear that findings indicate that people of different cultures simply think differently.
