This book is the first-ever complete monographon on the influential Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata and comes in two volumes and specially designed acrylic slipcase.

Shiro Kuramata (1934–91) was a truly exceptional designer of furniture and interiors. Many of his poetic, precise and unique pieces, like the expanded-metal-mesh How High the Moon Armchair and the acrylic, aluminium and paper-flower Miss Blanche Chair, are still highly prized, collected by museums like MoMA and the V&A and sold at auction. Sadly, however, most of the hundreds of interiors he designed no longer exist, and can only be glimpsed in photographs or described by those who saw them.

This combination of the precious and the disappeared is appropriate for a designer like Kuramata, whose work was neither modern nor nostalgic, neither western nor Asian, but which has a remarkable creative power as well as a sense of endless invention.

This book is the first-ever complete monographon on the influential Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata and comes in two volumes and specially designed acrylic slipcase.

Shiro Kuramata (1934–91) was a truly exceptional designer of furniture and interiors. Many of his poetic, precise and unique pieces, like the expanded-metal-mesh How High the Moon Armchair and the acrylic, aluminium and paper-flower Miss Blanche Chair, are still highly prized, collected by museums like MoMA and the V&A and sold at auction. Sadly, however, most of the hundreds of interiors he designed no longer exist, and can only be glimpsed in photographs or described by those who saw them.

This combination of the precious and the disappeared is appropriate for a designer like Kuramata, whose work was neither modern nor nostalgic, neither western nor Asian, but which has a remarkable creative power as well as a sense of endless invention. This compelling and highly influential work is documented here in this beautiful monograph.


Deyan Sudjic is Director of the Design Museum, London and a former Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University. He was previously editor of Blueprint and Domus magazines, and Director of the Venice Architecture Biennale (2002). Former architecture critic for the Observer, he has written and contributed to many books.