Once released from the camp, Akutagawa returned to California in 1946 and later moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Tazue Yonemoto, and her family. Photo by Jude Ignacio and Gerardine Vargas for Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation. Akutagawa’s facility with translating Japanese design vocabulary into the desert Southwest is most evident in his use of water and stone, seen here at the Catalina Foothills Estates in Arizona. The complex of three internment camps at Poston was planned by Del Webb, who would later gain some renown as the developer of several marquee retirement communities, including Sun City, Arizona. Akutagawa was interned at Poston, Arizona, on land within the Colorado River Indian Reservation. The order instructed the Secretary of War to create “prescribed military areas,” areas of heightened security along the West Coast, thus initiating a chain of events that forced more than 100,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry out of their homes and into internment camps farther inland. In February 1942, when he was 24, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which altered the life of Akutagawa and other Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. He was born in California in 1917 and educated in Japan before returning to California to work at his family’s small farming business. The outlines of Akutagawa’s life and work are known, though there is not quite a full accounting of his projects. The foundation’s Taro Akutagawa Collection contains photographs, newspaper clippings, archival images, drawings, and plans. The foundation is also among a handful of preservation groups trying to broaden notions of modern design to include the work of women and people of color, as well as expanding the boundaries of modernism to include textiles, dance, ceramics, and neon.Īmong those whom the foundation has brought to the public’s attention is Taro Akutagawa (1917–2002), a Japanese American landscape designer whose work, primarily in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been nearly erased. Tucson Modernism Week was launched by the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation in 2001 to highlight the region’s midcentury modern architecture and landscape heritage. In the Southwest, modernism incorporated regional materials and climatic adaptations into lively vernacular architecture, and also generated some truly inspired landscapes. In the 1950s and 1960s, home buyers, drawn by the mirage of golf course-adjacent desert living (with air-conditioning, swimming pools, and lawns), flocked to the Southwest, and large swaths of the new development that went up during that era were built in the middle-class modern idiom. Like many cities in the Southwest (Palm Springs, California, most conspicuously), Tucson, Arizona, has a decent bank of midcentury modern buildings and landscapes. This article is also available in Spanish The Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation restores the work of the Japanese American landscape designer Taro Akutagawa to the modernist desert Southwest.
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