Akio Okumura

Akio Okumura was born in Tokyo in 1928. He graduated from the architecture department of the Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1952 and worked in the design office of the architect Junzō Yoshimura from 1958 to 1964. He then taught architecture at Tokyo University of the Arts, first as assistant professor and from 1973 as professor, retiring in 1987 as professor emeritus.

In the same year, 1987, he became representative director of Kiso Mitake Okumura Design Office — the company that is today KAJART. Alongside his architectural practice he continued to design and make furniture with the workshop in Kiso. In 1996 he received the 24th Kunii Kitarō Industrial Craft Award.

His built work ranges from private houses to schools and a nursery — among the larger works is the campus of the Aichi University of the Arts, designed together with Junzō Yoshimura. In parallel he designed a large body of chairs, tables and other furniture, which the KAJART workshop continues to make today.

Sun, air and wood: the OM Solar system

Okumura’s most far-reaching contribution to architecture was the OM Solar system, a passive solar heating principle in which the house itself does the work. Air warmed by the sun beneath the roof is drawn down through the building and stored in the floor, providing heating and ventilation — and, in some versions, hot water. The system was never a device to be installed in a finished building: roof, air paths, floor and plan are designed as one, so that the house works as its own climate.

From 1995 to 2002 Okumura directed the OM Research Institute. The principle spread far beyond his own buildings: by the organisation’s own count it has been applied in more than twenty-five thousand houses across Japan, along with several hundred schools and other public buildings.

Its mark on modern Japanese architecture lies less in any single famous building than in a way of thinking: warmth, air and sunlight treated as architectural material, on equal terms with timber and plan. That approach was carried forward by the architects who studied and worked with him, and it remains part of environmentally conscious housing practice in Japan today. The same attention — to how material, climate and the body work together — runs through the furniture in this collection.