Super Potato Design

"We do not live only with clear-cut forms;rather, we exist in a world of forms that are often indistinct and vague." --Takashi Sugimoto, architect and James Beard Award-winning author

Super Potato Design presents the work of internationally-renowned Japanese designer Takashi Sugimoto. After studying metal sculpture at Tokyo University of Fine Arts, Sugimoto began his career designing a series of bars and restaurants including the iconic Radio Bar that became a favorite hangout for designers like Issey Miyake, Ikko Tanaka, Yohji Yamamoto and Tadao Ando. He was soon recruited to design retail spaces including the original Muji "no-brand" shops along with hotels, tea ceremony spaces and wedding chapels.

Super Potato's striking interiors have totally revolutionized Japanese design through the use of exposed concrete surfaces, rough-hewn timber and unevenly cut stone juxtaposed with salvaged metal and repurposed objects to create a sense of power and timelessness. The design vocabulary created by Sugimoto is universally imitated today (in Japan and throughout the world). It is what we now think of as "modern Japanese design"--although Sugimoto's own work has never been surpassed.

Super Potato Design presents 40 of Sugimoto's most important projects in 320 full-color photographs by Yoshio Shiratori, who has worked with the designer since the beginning. Author and architect Mira Locher introduces Sugimoto's work and provides a thorough description for each project. A foreword by Tadao Ando and discussions with architect Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama and graphic designer Kenya Hara explore the direction of Japanese design today. A list of Super Potato's complete works rounds off this fascinating book.
About the Author: Mira Locher is an architect and educator who works in the U.S., Canada and Japan. She studied at Smith College before receiving her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania. After working for Team Zoo Atelier Mobile in Japan, she set up an architectural practice in the U.S. with Takayuki Murakami (www.kajikaarchitecture.com). She is dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba and the author of many books including Japanese Architecture, Zen Gardens and Zen Garden Design.

Takashi Sugimoto (1945-2018), born in Tokyo in 1945, studied metal sculpture and graduated from the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 1968. He founded Super Potato in 1973 and became a professor at Musashino University of Fine Arts in 1992. He received the Mainichi Design Award in 1985 and 1986, as well as the Interior Design Association Award in 1992. Interior Design Magazine Hall of Fame inductee in 2008.

Yoshio Shiratori was born in Tokyo in 1938 and graduated from the Photography Department of the School of Fine Arts of Nihon University in 1960. He founded his own photo production company, ZOOM!, in 1973. In 1988, he received the 1987 Japan Interior Designers' Association Award.

Tadao Ando is one of the world's leading architects, winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize. As a young man, Ando worked as a boxer then decided to become an architect after being inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. Entirely self-taught, he established Tadao Ando Architects & Associates in 1968.