Hubertus Adam (Zürich)

Hubertus Adam is an art and architectural historian as well as an architectural critic and curator. He was an editor of Bauwelt (Berlin) in 1996/97 and of archithese (Zurich) from 1998 to 2012. From 2010 to 2015 he was director of the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel. Since 2021 he has been Editor-in-Chief of archithese.

Adam has published extensively on contemporary architecture, 20th-century architecture, art and sculpture around 1900, design history, landscape architecture, stage design, and the topic of monuments. He serves as a juror, speaker, moderator, and guest critic for various international institutions and universities. In 2004 he received the Swiss Art Award for his work in art and architecture education.

Bapam Baticam (Brussels)

A practicing architect based in Belgium, Bapam Baticam came across the work of Murano as a student in the Marster’s program in architecture at Université La Cambre-Horta in Brussel. Encouraged by Professor Pablo Lhoas, he wrote his master’s thesis (Mémoire de fin d’études) on this subject. Baticam has since visited Japan many times, working for a period at the office of Sou Fujimoto and traveling across the country to study Murano’s buildings. One of his long-term projects

is to write a book in French on Murano’s work.

Rika Fujioka (University of Tokyo)

Rika Fujioka is Professor of Business History at The University of Tokyo, Japan. Her research examines the history of modern retailing in Japan, particularly the development of department stores and their role in the modernization of retailing and consumption. Her publications include “Global and Local: Retail Transformation and the Department Store in Britain and Japan, 1900-1940” (Business History Review, 92(2), 2018, co-authored with Jon Stobart), “Western Models and Eastern Influences: Japanese Department Stores in the Early TwentiethCentury” (in Stobart, J. and Howard, V. (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing, 2019, Routledge) and “Retailing After the Industrial Revolution: Innovation, Growth, and New Format Development” (in M. Kipping, T. Kurosawa and D. E. Westney (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Industry Dynamics, 2023, Oxford University Press, co-authored with Jonathan Reynolds).

Hans H. Hanke (Bochum)

Dr. Hans H. Hanke is an architectural historian, heritage conservationist specialist and lecturer at Ruhr University Bochum. Until 2022, he served as a research officer at the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Westphalia; since then, he is an independent expert consultant. He chairs the architectural research association Ruhrmoderne e.V. He has published extensively on architecture and urban development in the Ruhr region, building activity during the Nazi period, twentieth-century urban planning and architecture, as well as industrial housing estates and cooperative housing developments from the seventeenth century to 1990.

Christian Tagsold (HHU Düsseldorf)

Professor Christian Tagsold works at the Department of Japanese Studies at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been researching Japanese gardens since 2006. His book Spaces in Translation: Japanese Gardens in the West (2017, University of Pennsylvania Press) was awarded the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize by the Vernacular Architecture Forum in 2019.

His new book, Turning Gardens in Japan into Japanese Gardens: Nation, Nature, Heritage, and Modernity since the 1890s (2025, Amsterdam University Press), explores how gardens like those of Ogawa Jihei have transformed over the past 100 years from “eclectic” designs into traditional Japanese gardens and national heritage.In the summer of 2025, Christian Tagsold held a June and Simon K.C. Li Fellow in East Asian Garden Studies at The Huntington for three months.

Christian Tagsold was one of the founding members of the European

Japanese Gardens Association and is currently one of its directors.

9:30–9:50 

Opening (Jens Niebaum) and introduction (Maki Iisaka)

9:50–10:50 

Christian Tagsold, "Landscapes of Japan’s International Hotel Culture: Two Case Studies of Togo Murano"

10:50–11:50

Rika Fujioka, "The Role of Togo Murano in the Development of Japanese Department Stores"

11:50–2:00

Lunch and exhibition tour (1:30–1:50)

2:00–3:00

Bapam Baticam, "The Presentist Togo Murano"

3:00–3:30

Coffee break

3:30–4:30

Hans H. Hanke, "Gifts for Peace. Some Reflections on Art and Politics in the World Peace Church"

4:30–5:30

Hubertus Adam, "Between Japan and the West: the Case of the Memorial Cathedral of World Peace"

5:30–

Symposium Dinner 

Moderators: Jens Niebaum (morning) and Jana Schröder (afternoon)

Hubertus Adam: Between Japan and the West: the Case of the Memorial Cathedral of World Peace

The Memorial Cathedral of World Peace (1954) is a significant work of Tōgo Murano that sought to give simultaneous expression to Japanese, religious, and modern sensibilities. I will introduce how the project came about, discuss the development of Murano's concept, and examine the extent to which the final design reflects Western and Japanese building traditions.

Bapam Baticam: The presentist Togo Murano

Shortly after graduating from the architecture program at the Waseda University, Murano wrote a manifesto titled “Above Style”, declaring himself to be a presentist who prioritizes the given condition rather than looking back to the past or towards the future. I will give a tour across his works to illustrate how this drove a deep exploration of material that led to many unexpected and unforeseen innovations.  

Rika Fujioka, "The Role of Togo Murano in the Development of Japanese Department Stores"

Department stores were the driving force of the Westernisation of Japanese consumer culture. Whilst providing consumers with a pleasant shopping experience, they also fostered the industries enabling the domestic production of new products introduced from the West during the interwar period. These department stores served as symbols of modern retailing and landmarks of urban development in Tokyo and Osaka during the period following the Second World War. Some of them were designed by leading architect Togo Murano. This presentation examines the role of Togo Murano in the development of Japanese department stores. It explores the impact of department-store architecture on the modernity and identity of department stores.

Hans H. Hanke, "Gifts for Peace. Some Reflections on Art and Politics in the World Peace Church"

In the period after 1945, the World Peace Church was the first architectural statement of a call for peace in the world, through its concept, architecture and interior design. With this building, Togo Murano created a Christian-Japanese ‘treasure chamber’ that housed valuable donations from all over the world. Numerous contributions came from the Federal Republic of Germany. These included church bells cast from steel in one of the large armaments factories of the Nazi era. One of the bells bears the inscription: ‘Germany, devastated by war, united with the people of Japan in the works of peace.’ What political and social stance is expressed in this message? The answers may be found in the history of the World Peace Church and the origins of the donations.

Christian Tagsold, "Landscapes of Japan’s International Hotel Culture: Two Case Studies of Togo Murano"

Throughout his long career, Murano Tōgo repeatedly ventured into the planning of international high-end hotels in Tokyo, Kyoto, and elsewhere. In two of his key projects, his work extended to the gardens and landscapes of the hotels and actively shaped their surroundings. At both the Miyako Hotel (Kyoto, 1959) and the Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa (Tokyo, 1982/85), Murano placed architecture coded as *sukiya* within Japanese-style garden landscapes embedded in the everyday operation of modern hotels, catering to international guests as well as Japanese corporate and private clients.

Murano’s interpretation and recreation of architectural forms associated with Japanese tradition in these settings raises broader questions about the trajectory of Japanese hotel culture in the postwar period. Japaneseness here became a mode of experiencing the surroundings, while at the same time being commodified for the requirements of modern international hospitality. Murano took elements associated with *sukiya* out of their earlier social contexts and put them to new uses within the modern hotel. His architecture and active use of gardens and landscapes thus helped create an appealing imagination of historical Japanese lifestyles, imbued with the comforts and infrastructures of modernity.